Chapter 220

[A] Since man was so desirous of making himself the equal of God, it would have been better, said Cicero, to bring the properties of God down to earth and to turn them into human attributes rather than to send our wretchedness and corruption up to heaven.206 But if you look at it aright, equally vain opinions have led Man, in various ways, to do both.

When philosophers go into the hierarchy of their gods and rush to distinguish the alliances, attributes and powers of each of them, I cannot believe they are serious.

When Plato deciphered for us the myth of the ‘Orchard of Dis’207 telling us of the physical pleasures and pains awaiting us (after our bodies have decayed into nothing!); when he associated them with sensations experienced in this present life –

Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circumSylva tegit; curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt.

[They hide away in secret glades, screened by myrtle groves on every side; even when dead their troubles do not leave them] –

and when Mahomet promised his followers a paradise decked out with tapestries and carpets, with ornaments of gold and precious stones, furnished with voluptuous nymphs of outstanding beauty, with wines and choice foods to eat: I realized that they were both laughing at us, stooping low to tempt our brutish stupidity with sweet allurements, enticing us with notions and hopes appropriate to our mortal appetites.

[C] Even some of our Christians have fallen into a similar error, promising themselves an earthly life after our resurrection, a life within time, accompanied by all kinds of worldly pleasures and comforts. [A] Plato’s thoughts were all of heaven; his familiarity with things divine was so great that the surname Divine has clung to him ever since;208 are we to believe that even he thought there was, in a wretched creature like Man, something able to approach such incomprehensible Power? Did he believe that we, with our feeble grasp, could actually have a share in eternal blessedness or reprobation, or that our senses were robust enough to do so?209

This is what we ought to say to him, on behalf of human reason:

If the pleasures you offer me in the next life are related to ones I have experienced here on earth, that can have nothing to do with the Infinite. Even if my five natural senses were overwhelmed with joy; even if this soul of mine were seized of all the happiness she could ever hope for or desire, we know her limitations:210 that would amount to nothing. Where there remains anything of mine, there is nothing divine. If your promises merely relate to what can exist in our present condition, they cannot enter into the reckoning. [C] All the pleasures of mortals are mortal. [A] Take recognizing parents, children and friends in the next world: if that can touch us and titillate us, if we grasp at such pleasures as that, then we still remain within earthbound,211 finite pleasures. We cannot condignly conceive those high, divine promises if we are able to conceive them at all. To imagine them condignly, we must imagine them unimaginable, unutterable, incomprehensible [C] and entirely different from our own wretched experiences. [A] ‘Eye cannot see’, says St Paul, ‘nor can there rise up in the heart of man, what God has prepared for his own.’212 And if (as you assert, Plato, with your ‘purifications’) we have to modify our being in order to render ourselves capable of celestial joy, that would mean a change so extreme and so total that (as we know from Physics) we would cease to be ourselves:

[B] Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat; at ille, Tractus ab Aemonio, non erat Hector, equo.

[Hector was killed in battle: but it was not Hector who was dragged along by Achilles’ horse.]

[A] Something else would receive our rewards.

[B] quod mutatur, dissolvitur; interit ergo: Trajiciuntur enim partes atque ordine migrant.

[When what is changed is loosened asunder, that is death. The elements are displaced and change their ordered places.]213”

[A] Pythagoras thought up his metempsychosis in which souls change their dwelling-places: are we to think that the lion which is now housing the soul of Caesar has espoused the passions which moved Caesar, [C] or that it really is Caesar? And if it really were Caesar, then victory would lie with those who opposed Plato over this opinion, pointing out, among other absurdities, that a son might well find himself astride his mother, now clothed in the body of a mule.214

Do we doubt [A] that, in such transmigrations as may take place within the same species, the newcomers are different from their forebears? They say that from the ashes of the Phoenix there is born first a worm and then another Phoenix; can anyone think that the second Phoenix is no different from the first? The worm which produces silk for us can be seen dying and shrivelling up: then, from that same body a butterfly appears; that produces another worm: it would be absurd to think it was still the first one. That which once ceases to be no longer exists.

Nec si materiam nostram collegerit aetas Post obitum, rursumque redegerit, ut sita nunc est, Atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitae, Pertineat quidquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum, Interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostra.

[If Time, after we are dead, should gather our matter together and make it as it now is; if the light of life were again granted to us – even that would not concern us, once the thread of our memory has been snapped asunder.]

You assert somewhere or other, Plato, that rewards in the life to come concern the spiritual part of man, but that remains just as unlikely.

[B] Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam Dispicere ipse oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto.

[For an eye torn from its socket and removed from its body can see nothing whatsoever.]

[A] By your reckoning, it would no longer be Man who is touched by such Joy – no longer us: for we are built of two principal parts, which together form our being; to separate them is death and the collapse of our being.

[B] Inter enim jecta est vitai pausa, vagequeDeerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.

[For life has been interrupted. No motions can affect our senses now; they are quite lost.]

When the limbs a man had in life are eaten by worms and turning to dust we never say that the man is feeling pain:

Et nihil hoc ad nos, qui coitu conjugioque Corporis atque animae consistimus uniter apti.

[That is nothing to us. We are a union formed from the marriage and embrace of body and soul.]215

Moreover, what just grounds do the gods have for noting and rewarding, after death, a man’s good, virtuous deeds? Within that man it is the gods themselves who nurtured and produced them. And why are the gods offended by his vicious deeds? Why do they punish them? They themselves brought him forth in this faulty state; with a mere nod of their will they can prevent his failure.216

Surely Epicurus, with every appearance of human rationality, could have raised such objections to Plato, [C] had he not already covered himself by his oft-repeated conclusion: ‘From mortal nature nothing certain can be inferred about the Immortal.’

[A] Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine. Who knows that better than we do? For we have supplied Reason with principles which are certain and infallible; we light her steps with the holy lamp of that Truth which God has been pleased to impart to us; yet we can see, every day, that as soon as she is allowed to deviate, however slightly, from the normal path, turning and straying from the beaten track traced for us by the Church, she immediately stumbles and becomes inextricably lost; she whirls aimlessly about, bobbing unchecked on the huge, troubled, surging sea of human opinion. As soon as she misses that great public highway she disintegrates and scatters in hundreds of different directions.

Man cannot be other than he is; he cannot have thoughts beyond his reach. [B] Plutarch says that it is greater arrogance for mere men to start talking and arguing about gods and demi-gods than for a man who knows nothing whatever about music to start criticizing singers, or for a man who has never been on a battlefield to try and argue about arms and war, from some trivial conjecture presuming to understand an art which far exceeds his knowledge.217

[A] I believe that, in the Ancient World, men thought they were actually enhancing the greatness of God when they made him equal to Man, clothed him with Man’s faculties and made him a present of Man’s fair humours [C] and even of his most shameful necessities; [A] they offered him our food to eat, [C] our dances, mummeries and farces to amuse him; [A] our vestments to clothe him and our houses to dwell in, courting him with odours of incense, sounds of music and garlands of flowers; [C] they made him conform to our own vicious passions, subverting his justice in the name of inhuman vengeance, causing him to rejoice in the smashing and wasting of the very things he had created and protected (as Tiberius Sempronius did when he made a burned sacrifice to Vulcan of the arms and treasures seized as booty from his enemies in Sardinia; as Paul Aemilius did, when he sacrificed the spoils of Macedonia to Mars and Minerva, and as Alexander did, when he reached the shores of the Indian Ocean and sought the favour of Thetis by casting many huge golden jars into the sea).218 More. They loaded his altars with butchered carcasses – not only of innocent beasts but of men, [A] following the established custom of many peoples – including our own; no nation, I believe, is exempt: all have assayed it.

[B] Sulmone creatosQuattuor hic juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens, Viventes rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris.

[He took alive four young men, begot by Sulmo, and another four bred by Ufens, to immolate them as sacrifices to the Shades.]219

[C] The Getae think they are immortal; for them, dying is but a journey to their God Zamolxis. Every five years they dispatch one of their number to him to ask for what they need. The ambassador is chosen by lot. The actual dispatching takes this form: the man is told of his charge by word of mouth; three of those present hold three javelins upright, the others toss the man on to them. If some vital organ is impaled and he dies at once, that is a clear indication of divine approval. If he escapes death, he is thought to be evil and accursed, so another ambassador is similarly dispatched.

On one occasion, when Amestris the mother of Xerxes had grown old and wished to appease some god of the Underworld, she caused fourteen young men from the best families in Persia to be buried alive, in accordance with the religious rites of that country. And even today the cement used to make the idols of Themistitan is mixed with the blood of little children, since the only sacrifices they relish are the pure souls of little boys: Justice hungry for innocent blood!

Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.

[So great are the evils Religion has encouraged.]220

[B] The Carthaginians sacrificed their own children to Saturn; those who had none of their own, bought some; their fathers and mothers had to attend the service, looking happy and contented. [A] It is a strange notion to seek to requite divine Goodness with our human affliction; the Spartans did: they courted that Diana of theirs with the suffering of boys who were flogged for her sake – sometimes flogged to death. It was a savage humour which sought to please the Architect by ruining what he had built; to ward off the punishment due to the guilty by punishing the innocent; or to believe that that poor wretched Iphigenia, by her sacrificial death in the port of Aulis, could free the Greek army of the weight of offences they had committed against God.

[B] Et casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso, Hostia concideret mactatu moesta parentis.

[At the very time of her wedding, the pure was impurely slaughtered, a victim sadly murdered by her father.]

[C] And there were the fair and noble souls of the two Decii, father and son, who threw themselves wildly into the thick of the enemy, as a propitiation to make the gods favour the affairs of Rome: ‘Quae fuit tanta deorum iniquitas, ut placari populo Romano non possent, nisi tales occidissent’ [What great wickedness on the part of the gods to refuse to favour the Roman People unless such men were killed!].221

[A] We might add that it is not for the criminal to decide how and when he will be whipped: it is for the judge, who can only take account of such chastisements as he himself has ordered and who cannot treat as punishment anything that is pleasing to the sufferer. Both for the sake of its own justice and of our punishment, God’s vengeance must presuppose our complete resistance to it.

[B] It was an absurd caprice on the part of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, to cast his most precious jewel into the sea to atone for his continuous run of good fortune by interrupting its course; he thought to placate the turning Wheel of Fortune with a carefully arranged disaster. [C] Fortune, to mock such absurdity, caused the jewel to be returned into his hands through the belly of a fish.

[A] And then [C] what is the use of all those lacerations and loppings off of limbs practised by the Corybantes and Maenads, or, in our own day, by the Mahometans who slash their faces, their bellies and their limbs, to please their prophet, seeing that [A] the offence lies in the will not [C] in the breast, the eyes, the genitals, a well-rounded belly or in [A] the shoulders or the throat. [C] ‘Tantus est perturbatae mentis et sedibus suis pulsae furor, ut sic Dii placentur, quemadmodum ne homines quidem saeviunt’ [Such is their frenzy, arising from minds disturbed and forcibly unhinged, that it is thought the gods can be placated by surpassing even our human cruelty].

How we treat the natural fabric of our bodies concerns not only ourselves but the service of God and of other men. It is not right to harm it deliberately, just as it is wrong to kill ourselves on any pretext whatsoever. There is, it seems, both great treachery and great cowardice in whipping and mutilating the servile, senseless functions of our bodies in order to spare our souls the trouble of governing them reasonably: ‘Ubi iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios habere merentur? In regiae libidinis voluptatem castrati sunt quidam; sed nemo sibi, ne vir esset, jubente domino, manus intulit’ [What do they think the gods are angry about, when they believe they can propitiate them thus? Some have been castrated to serve the lust of kings, but no one has ever emasculated himself, even at the command of his master]. [A] In this way they filled their religion with many bad deeds,

saepius olim Relligio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.

[Too often in the past, religion has given birth to impious and wicked actions.]222

Nothing of ours can be compared or associated with the Nature of God, in any way whatsoever, without smudging and staining it with a degree of imperfection. How can infinite Beauty, Power and Goodness ever suffer any juxtaposition or comparison with a thing as abject as we are, without experiencing extreme harm and derogating from divine Greatness? [C] ‘Infirmum dei fortius est hominibus, et stultum Dei sapientius est hominibus’ [The weakness of God is stronger than men and the foolishness of God is wiser than men].223

Stilpon the philosopher was asked whether the gods took pleasure in our homage and sacrifices: ‘You are most indiscreet,’ he replied; ‘if you want to talk about that, let us draw aside.’224 [A] And yet we prescribe limits in the Infinite and besiege his mighty power with those reasons of ours (I call our ravings and our dreamings ‘reasons’, under the general dispensation of Philosophy who maintains that even the fool and the knave act madly ‘from reason’ – albeit from one special form of reason).225

We wish to make God subordinate to our human understanding with its vain and feeble probabilities; yet it is he who has made both us and all we know. ‘Since nothing can be made from nothing: God could not construct the world without matter.’ What! Has God placed in our hands the keys to the ultimate principles of his power? Did he bind himself not to venture beyond the limits of human knowledge? Even if we admit, O Man, that you have managed to observe some traces of his acts here in this world, do you think that he has used up all his power by filling that work with every conceivable Form and Idea? You only see – if you see that much – the order and government of this little cave in which you dwell; beyond, his Godhead has an infinite jurisdiction. The tiny bit that we know is nothing compared with ALL:

omnia cum coelo terraque marique Nil sunt ad summam summai totius omnem.

[The entire heavens, sea and land are nothing compared with the greatest ALL of all.]226

The laws you cite are by-laws: you have no conception of the Law of the Universe. You are subject to limits: restrict yourself to them, not God. He is not one of your equals; he is not a fellow-citizen or a companion. He has revealed a little of himself to you, but not so as to sink down to your petty level or to make himself accountable for his power to you. The human body cannot fly up to the clouds – that applies to you! The Sun runs his ordered course and never stops still; the boundaries of sea and land can never be confounded; water is yielding and not solid; a material body cannot pass through a solid wall; a man cannot stay alive in a furnace; his body cannot be present in heaven, on earth and in a thousand places at once. It is for you that he made these laws; it is you who are restricted by them. God, if he pleases, can be free from all of them: he has made Christians witnesses to that fact. And in truth, since he is omnipotent, why should he restrict the measure of his power to definite limits? In whose interest ought he to give up being a Law unto himself?

That Reason of yours never attains more likelihood or better foundations than when it succeeds in persuading you that there are many worlds:

[B] Terramque, et solem, lunam, mare, caetera quae sunt Non esse unica, sed numero magis innumerali.

[The earth, the sun, the moon and all that exists are not unique, but numerous beyond numbering.]

[A] That belief was held by the most famous minds of former ages (and still is by some today), on grounds which, to purely human reason, seem compelling, because nothing else within the fabric of the universe stands unique and alone:

[B] cum in summa res nulla sit una, Unica quae gignatur, et unica solaque crescat.

[Since nothing born of Nature is unique, nor when it grows is anything unique or all alone.]

[A] There is some element of multiplicity within every species; it seems unlikely, therefore, that God made only this one universe and no other like it, or that all the matter available for this Form should have been exhausted on this one Particular:

[B] Quare etiam atque etiam tales fateare necesse estEsse alios alibi congressus materiai,Qualis hic est avido complexu quem tenet aether.

[Such things must be said again and again: there are, elsewhere, other material aggregates than the one which the air enfolds in her keen embrace.]

[A] That is especially the case if the universe has a soul–something which its movements make credible, [C] so credible that Plato was sure of it; many Christians, too, either allow it or dare not disallow it, any more than the ancient opinion that the heavens, all heavenly bodies and other constituent parts of the universe are creatures composed of body and soul, subject to mortality, being composite, but immortal by the decree of their Maker.227

[A] Now, if there are several worlds, as [C] Democritus, [A] Epicurus and almost the whole of philosophy have opined, how do we know whether the principles and laws which apply to this world apply equally to the others? Other worlds may present different features and be differently governed. [C] Epicurus thought of them as being both similar and dissimilar.228 [A] Even within our own world we can see how mere distance produces infinite differences and variety. Neither wheat nor wine was found in those New Lands discovered by our fathers, nor any of our animals: everything there is different. [C] And only think of those parts of the world which, in times gone by, had no knowledge of Bacchus’ grapes or Ceres’ corn.

[A] Should anyone care to believe Pliny [C] and Herodotus,229 [A] there are species of men, in some places, which have very little resemblance to our own; [B] there are some ambiguous, mongrel forms, between the human and the beast; there are lands where men are born without heads, having eyes and mouths in their chests; there are androgynous creatures and creatures who walk on all fours, have only one eye in the middle of their forehead, or have a head more more like a dog’s than our own; some are fishes below the waist and live in water; some have wives who give birth at five and die at eight; other men have skin on their forehead and on the rest of their cranium so hard that iron spears cannot dent it but simply blunt themselves; there are men without beards, [C] peoples without the use or knowledge of fire and others who ejaculate black semen.

[B] What about those people who, by natural means, can change into wolves [C] and mares [B] and back again? And [A1] even if you were to accept as true [A] what Plutarch says (that somewhere in the Indies there are men without mouths who sustain themselves by inhaling certain smells) how many of our own descriptions today are certainly wrong!230 If laughter were no longer the property of Man and if Man were no longer a political animal able to reason, our conception of what our inner disposition and causations are would be largely irrelevant…231

To go further, we have imposed our own commandments on Nature and carved them in stone: yet how many things do we know which defy those fine rules of ours! And yet we try to bind God by them!

How many things are there which we call miraculous or contrary to Nature? [C] All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance. [A] How many quintessences, how many occult properties have we discovered! For us, following Nature means following our own intelligence as far as it is able to go and as far as we are able to see.232 Everything else is a monster, outside the order of Nature! By that reasoning the cleverest and wisest men would find everything monstrous, since they are convinced that reason has no foundation to stand on, not even to determine [C] whether snow is white (Anaxagoras said it was black), or whether there are such things as knowledge and ignorance (Metrodorus of Chios denied that Man could ever know), [A] or even whether we are alive: Euripides hesitates, ‘Is life this life that we live now? Or is life really what we call death?’ That is:

233

[B] There is a degree of probability in that alternative: for why do we give the name existence to that instant which amounts to no more than a flash of lightning against the infinite course of eternal light, or to that tiny break which interrupts the condition which is naturally ours for all eternity, [C] since death fills everything before that moment and everything which comes afterwards as well as a large part of the moment itself?

[B] Some swear that nothing moves and that there is no such thing at all as motion – [C] as was believed by the followers of Melissus (since, as Plato proves, there is no place for spherical motion within strict Unity, nor even for movement from one place to another) – [B] or that there is, in Nature, no generation and no corruption. [C] Protagoras says that in Nature nothing exists but doubt: that everything is equally open to discussion, including the assertion that everything is equally open to discussion; Nausiphanes holds that among phenomena there is nothing which is rather than is not: that nothing is certain but uncertainty. For Parmenides, within the world of phenomena there is no such thing as genus: there is only Unity. For Zeno, there is not even Unity, only Nothing: for if Unity exists it must exist either within another or within itself; if it exists in another, that makes two; if it exists within itself, that still makes two – the container and the thing contained.

According to these tenets, Nature is but a shadow, false or vain.234

[A] It has always seemed to me that certain expressions are too imprudent and irreverent for a Christian: ‘God cannot die’; ‘God cannot change his mind’; ‘God cannot do this or cannot do that’. I find it unacceptable that the power of God should be limited in this way by the rules of human language; these propositions offer an appearance of truth, but it ought to be expressed more reverently and more devoutly. Our speech, like everything else, has its defects and weaknesses. Most of the world’s squabbles are occasioned by grammar! Lawsuits are born from disputes over the interpretation of laws; most wars arise from our inability to express clearly the conventions and treaties agreed on by monarchs. How many quarrels, momentous quarrels, have arisen in this world because of doubts about the meaning of that single syllable Hoc.235

[B] Take the proposition which Logic asserts to be the clearest of all. If you say ‘The weather is fine’ and you say it truly, then the weather is fine. That seems to be clear enough; and yet such a formula can lead us astray. You can see that from the following example: if you say, ‘I lie’, and you say it truly, then you lie! In both cases, the art, reason and force of the conclusion are the same: yet the second leaves you stogged in the mud!236

[A] Pyrrhonist philosophers, I see, cannot express their general concepts in any known kind of speech; they would need a new language: ours is made up of affirmative propositions totally inimical to them – so much so that when they say ‘I doubt’, you can jump down their throats and make them admit that they at least know one thing for certain, namely that they doubt. To save themselves they are constrained to draw an analogy from medicine: without it their sceptical humour would never get purged! When they say I know not or I doubt that affirmation purges itself (they maintain) along with all the others, exactly like a dose of rhubarb, which evacuates all our evil humours, itself included.237

[B] (Scepticism can best be conceived through the form of a question: ‘What do I know?’ – Que sçay-je, words inscribed on my emblem of a Balance.)238

[A] See how people avail themselves of such forms of speech as are full of irreverence. In our present religious strife, if you press your adversaries too hard they will bluntly reply that it exceeds God’s power to make his body be in paradise and in several places on earth all at the same time. How that scoffer239 among the Ancients exploited similar assertions! ‘At least’, he said, ‘it is no light comfort for Man to know that God cannot do everything! God cannot kill himself when he wants to (which is the greatest prerogative attached to the human condition); he cannot bring the dead back to life; he cannot make someone not to have lived who has lived, or not to have received honour who has received honour; he has no jurisdiction over the past other than to make it merge into oblivion; finally (so that this equality of status in God and Man can be further strengthened with amusing examples), God cannot even stop ten and ten from making twenty!’ That is what he says – and what should never pass a Christian’s lips. Whereas, on the contrary, men seem to me to go looking for such insane and arrogant terms in order to cut God down to their own size:

cras vel atraNube polum pater occupato, Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum Quodcumque retro est, efficiet, neque Diffinget infectumque reddet Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.

[Tomorrow the Father can cover the pole with black clouds or with pure sunlight, but he cannot change the past, he cannot undo or annul anything that fleeting time has borne away.]

When we say that countless ages – ages past and ages yet to come – are but a moment to God and that God’s essence consists in goodness, wisdom, power, we utter words, but our intelligence cannot grasp the sense. Despite that, we, in our arrogance, want to force God through human filters. All the raving errors that this world possesses are bred from trying to squeeze on to human scales weights far beyond their capacity: [C] ‘Mirum quo procedat improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo invitata successu’ [It is astonishing how far the impudence of the human heart can go, once encouraged by the least success].

How insolently the Stoics taunt Epicurus for holding that essential goodness and happiness belong to God alone, so that the Sage can only possess some shadowy likeness of them. [A] How rashly they subject God to Destiny (would that some who bear the name of Christians did not do so still);240 Thales, Plato and Pythagoras even make God the slave of Necessity. This fierce desire to scan the Divine through human eyes even brought one of our own great Christian figures to endow God with a corporeal shape;241 [B] it also explains why we daily assign to God a peculiar responsibility for any event, the outcome of which seems important to us. We attach particular weight to such events, so God must do so too, paying more attention to them than to others which seem unimportant to us or simply part of the regular order: [C] ‘magna dii curant, parva negligunt!’ [The gods take care of great matters and neglect the small!] Listen to the example given and you will see more clearly what is meant: ‘nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant’ [Even kings in their kingdoms do not concern themselves with every tiny detail]. As though it were more difficult for God to shake an empire than to shake a leaf, or as though his Providence were exercised differently when influencing the outcome of a battle and the jump of a flea.

The hand of God’s governance supports all things with an equal and unchanging sway, with the same order, the same power. Our concerns contribute nothing to this; our human activities and standards are quite irrelevant: ‘Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit in parvis’ [In great things God is a great artificer, but in such a way that he is no less great in little things].

Our arrogance constantly finds fresh ways of blasphemously equating man with God: our jobs are a burden to us men, so Strato endows the gods – and their priests – with complete immunity from work! For Strato it is Nature who produces and maintains all things, Nature who constructs every part of the universe with her weights and her forces. In this way he frees mankind of a burden: the fear of divine judgement: ‘Quod beatum aeternumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri’ [A blessed and eternal Being has no duties and imposes none on others].242

‘Nature’s will is that like things should have like correlatives; for example: the fact that mortals are innumerable leads to the conclusion that the immortals are too; the vast number of things which kill or do harm leads to the conclusion that an equivalent number preserve and do good’; so, just as the souls of the gods have no tongue, eyes or ears yet can understand each other and also judge what we are thinking: so too the souls of men, when free from the bonds of the body in sleep or any kind of ecstasy, have powers of divination, can foretell the future and see such things as they could never see when joined to their bodies… [A] ‘Men’, says St Paul, ‘have become fools, professing to be wise, and have changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of corruptible man’.243

[B] Only consider what jugglers’ farces those ‘deifications’ were among the Ancients. After the stately pride and pomp of the funeral procession, just as the fire was taking hold of the apex of the pyre and about to engulf the litter with the dead man on it, they would release an eagle which flew upwards, representing the soul making its way to Paradise. We still possess a thousand medallions (above all, the one of that – oh, so honourable – woman Faustina) where the eagle is portrayed bearing off the deified soul, which is slung over its shoulder just like a dead goat! It is pitiful the way we deceive ourselves with the monkey-tricks that we invent;

Quod finxere timent

[They are terrified of their own creations]

– like children who are scared by the very face of the friend they have just daubed with black. [C] ‘Quasi quicquam infelicius sit homine cui sua figmenta dominantur’ [As though anything were more pitiful than a man overmastered by his own figments].244

We are far from honouring him who made us when we honour a creature we ourselves have made.

[B] Augustus had more temples than did Jupiter, in which he was served with just as much devotion and just as much belief in his miracles.

The Thasians, wishing to repay the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to tell him that they had put him on the canonical list of their gods. ‘Are you a people’, he asked, ‘who have the power to make a god of anyone you please? Just to see, first make a god of one of yourselves; and then, [C] when I have learned how he has prospered, [B] I will come and thank you heartily for your offer.’

[C] Man is indeed out of his mind. He cannot even create a fleshworm, yet creates gods by the dozen. Just listen to Hermes Trismegistus praising our sufficiency: ‘Among all the things which can astonish us, one thing has surpassed astonishment itself: Man’s capacity to discover what the Divine nature is and then proceed to create it.’

[B] Here are some arguments from the very school in which Philosophy learned her lessons:

Nosse cui Divos et coeli numina soli, Aut soli nescire, datum

[Philosophy, she to whom alone it is given to know the gods and the numinous powers of heaven, or, alone, to know that they cannot be known!]245

– If God exists, (she says) he is animate; if he is animate he has senses; if he has senses, he is subject to corruption! If he is incorporeal, he has no soul and consequently is without activity; if he is corporeal, then he is mortal! What a triumph! – [C] We could never make this world; therefore a Nature even more excellent than ours must have taken the task in hand! – It would be stupid arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect object in the universe: there must therefore be one thing better: God! – When you see a rich and stately dwelling you may not know who the master of it is, but at least you could say that it was not built for rats: take the divine architecture of the palaces of heaven, which we ourselves can see; does it not oblige us to believe that it is the dwelling-place of a Master greater even than we are? – Is not the higher always more worthy – and we are at the bottom. – Nothing without reason and soul can beget an animate creature capable of reason: the world has begotten us: therefore it has both reason and soul! – Each part of us is less than the whole: we are part of the world: the world is, therefore, provided with wisdom and reason more abundantly than we are. – It is a fair thing to hold great powers of government: the government of the world must, therefore, belong to some happy Nature. – The heavenly bodies do us no harm: they are, therefore, full of goodness. – [B] We need food: so do the gods, who feed on vapours rising up from here below! – [C] Worldly goods are not goods to God: therefore they are not goods to us. – To do harm and to experience harm are equal proofs of weakness: it is therefore mad to be afraid of God! – God is good by nature, man by industry: which makes man superior! – There is no difference between divine wisdom and human wisdom, except that the divine is eternal: but time adds nothing to the quality of wisdom: therefore we and God are on equal footing! [B] We enjoy life, reason, freedom and we esteem goodness, love and justice: therefore these qualities must be in God!

In short, both constructively and destructively, we forge for ourselves the attributes of God, taking ourselves as the correlative. What a model, what a pattern! Take human qualities and stretch them, raise them, magnify them as much as you please! Wretched little Man, puff yourself up as much as you like! More. More. More still: ‘Non si te ruperis, inquit’… [‘Not even’, he said, ‘if you burst.’]. [C] ‘Profecto non Deum, quem cogitare non possunt, sed semet ipsos pro illo cogitantes, non illum sed se ipsos non illi sed sibi comparant’ [Indeed, Men cannot conceive of God, so they base their conceptions on themselves instead; they do not compare themselves to him, but him to themselves].246

[B] Even within Nature, effects barely suggest half their causes. But what of this Cause? God is a Cause completely above the order of Nature. His mode of being is too high, too distant, too magisterial to allow our logical conclusions to judge or to bind him. We shall never get that far by our own efforts: our path is too lowly. We are no nearer the heavens on the top of Mount Cenis than we are at the bottom of the sea. Your astrolabe will tell you that.

Yet men even reduce God to having sexual intercourse with women, noting how often he did it and for how many births.

Paulina, the wife of Saturninus, was a Roman matron of great reputation; she thought she was lying with a god, Serapis, but through the pimping of the temple-priests she found herself in the arms of a lover.247 [C] In his treatises on theology, Varro, the most subtle and learned of Latin authors, wrote of a sexton in the temple of Hercules who cast dice with both hands, one for himself, the other for Hercules. The stakes were a supper and a woman: if he won, he paid for them out of the collection; if he lost, he paid for them himself. He lost; so the cost of the woman and dinner fell to himself. Now the woman was called Laurentina; lying that night with this ‘god’ in her arms, she heard him volunteer the remark that the first man she met when she left in the morning would see that she received from heaven the money she had just earned. She did in fact meet a rich young man called Taruntius who took her back home and eventually left her all his money. She in her turn, hoping to do an action pleasing to this god, left her inheritance to the Roman People, who then bestowed divine honours upon her.248

As though it were simply not enough that Plato should be descended, on both sides, from the gods, with Neptune as the common ancestor, it was believed as a fact in Athens that, when Ariston had wished to consummate his love for the fair Perictione, he could not bring it off; he was warned in a dream by the god Apollo not to deflower her but to leave her a virgin until she had given birth… And they were Plato’s father and mother!249

How many other accounts are there of similar cuckoldries procured by the gods against wretched human beings, or of husbands unjustly defamed to honour their children! In the religion of Mahomet the people believe that there are ‘Merlins’ in plenty – children, that is, begot without fathers, spiritual children divinely conceived in virgins’ wombs. (They are given a special name which, in their language, means just that.)250

[B] We should note that no creature holds anything dearer than the kind of being that it is [C] (lions, eagles, dolphins value nothing above their own species) [B] and that every species reduces the qualities of everything else to analogies with its own. We can extend our characteristics or reduce them, but that is all we can do, since our intellect can do nothing and guess nothing except on the principle of such analogies; it is impossible for it to go beyond that point. [C] That explains Ancient philosophical conclusions such as these: Man is the most beautiful of all forms, so God must also have that form! – No one can be happy without virtue; virtue cannot be without reason: no reason can dwell elsewhere but in the human shape: therefore God is clad in a human shape! ‘Ita est informatum, anticipatum mentibus nostris ut homini, cum de Deo cogitet, forma occurrat humana’ [The mould and prejudice of our minds are such that when we think of God it is the human form which occurs to them].251

[B] That is why Xenophanes said with a smile that if the beasts invent gods for themselves, as they probably do, they certainly make them like themselves, glorifying themselves – as we do.252 For why should a gosling not argue thus: ‘All the parts of the universe are there for me: the earth serves me to waddle upon, the sun to give me light; the heavenly bodies exist to breathe their influences upon me; the winds help me this way, the waters, that way: there is nothing which the vault of Heaven treats with greater favour than me. I am Nature’s darling: does not Man care for me, house me, serve me? It is for me that Man sows and grinds his corn; it is true that he eats me, but he also eats his fellow-men, and I eat the worms which kill him and eat him.’

A crane could say the same – even more majestically on account of the freedom of its flight and its secure enjoyment of those fair and higher regions: [C] ‘Tam blanda conciliatrix et tam sui est lena ipsa natura’ [So flattering a procuress is Nature, such a seductress of herself].253

[B] Well, if that is how it goes, the Universe and the Fates are all for us! The lightning flashes for us; the thunder crashes for us; the Creator and all his creatures exist just for us. We are the end which the entire Universe is aiming towards. Just examine the records of celestial affairs which Philosophy has kept for two thousand years and more: the gods have acted and spoken only for Man. Philosophy attributes no other concern to them, no other employment: they go to war against us,

domitosque Herculea manuTelluris juvenes, unde periculumFulgens contremuit domusSaturni veteris.

[The Sons of Earth, those Titans at whose assault the shining house of ancient Saturn shook with fear, are defeated by the hand of Hercules.]

The gods side with us in our civil disturbances, [C] to return our services, since we have so often taken sides in theirs:

[B] Neptunus muros magnoque emota tridentiFundamenta quatit, totamque a sedibus urbem Eruit. Hic Juno Scaeas saevissima portas Prima tenet.

[With his mighty trident Neptune shakes the walls of Troy to their foundations and dashes the whole city to the ground; here, implacable Juno holds the Scaean gates.]

[C] On their feast-days, the Caunians, jealous for the hegemony of their own gods, load weapons on their shoulders and charge around the outskirts of their city stabbing their swords into the air, fighting the foreign gods to the finish and driving them out of their lands.254

[B] The powers of the gods are tailored to meet our human needs: this one cures horses, another, men; [C] this one, the plague, [B] that one, the ring-worm, that one, the cough; [C] this one cures one sort of mange; that one, another: ‘adeo minimis etiam rebus prava religio inserit deos’ [Thus does religion, when depraved, bring the gods even into the most trivial affairs]; [B] this god makes grapes to grow, another, garlic; this god is responsible for lechery, that one, for trade, [C] (each tribe of craftsmen has its god!); [B] this god’s sway and reputation lie in the East; that god’s lie in the West.

hic illius arma, Hic currus fuit;

[Here were her arms, here stood her chariot;] [C] O Sancte Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obtines; [O holy Apollo, thou that holdest sway in the Navel of the world;]

Pallada Cecropidae, Minoia Creta Dianam, Vulcanum tellus Hipsipilea colit,

Junonem Sparte Pelopeiadesque Mycenae;Pinigerum Fauni Maenalis ora caput; Mars Latio venerandus.

[The descendants of Cecrops worship Pallas in Athens; Minoan Crete worships Diana; Lemnos, Vulcan; Sparta and Peloponnesian Mycenae, Juno. Pan, crowned with pine leaves, is venerated in Maenalus; and Mars in Latium.]

[B] This god has only a single town or family under his sway, [C] that one lives alone, but the other one, willingly or from necessity, lives with his peers:

Junctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo. [The grandson’s temple is amalgamated with the temple of his grandsire.]255

[B] Some of these gods are so mean and so lowly (for their number amounts to thirty-six thousand) that you need a pile of five or six of them to make a grain of corn – their various names are taken from this – [C] you need three for a door (one for the wood, one for the hinge, one for the doorstep); then you need four for an infant (protecting its cradle, its drink, its food and its sucking). The functions of some are uncertain and doubtful; others are not allowed into Paradise yet:

Quos quoniam coeli nondum dignamur honore, Quas dedimus certe terras habitare sinamus.

[Since some are not yet worthy to be honoured with paradise, we at least allow them to dwell in the lands we have given them.]

There are nature-gods, poetic gods, civic gods; there are intermediary beings, half-way between the divine nature and the human, who are mediators, doing business between us and God and worshipped with an inferior, second-grade worship; they have innumerable titles and duties. Some are good: some are bad. [B] There are gods who are old and decrepit; there are gods who are mortal; for Chrysippus considered that all gods died in the last great conflagration of the world, except Jupiter.

[C] Man invents a thousand amusing links of fellowship between himself and God. Is God not a fellow-Countryman! ‘Jovis incunabula Creten’ [Crete, cradle of Jupiter].256

Here is the justification given after reflection by Scaevola, a great Pontifex, and by Varro, a great theologian (both ‘great’ in their time): it is necessary (they said) that people should not know many things which are true and should believe many things which are false, ‘cum veritatem qua liberetur, inquirat, credatur ei expedire, quod fallitur’ [since man only wants to find such truth as sets him free, it can be thought expedient for him to be deceived].257

[B] Human eyes can only perceive things in accordance with such Forms as they know. [C] We forget what a tumble the wretched Phaëton took when, with a mortal hand, he tried to manage the reins of his father’s horses: our rashness causes our minds to take a similar plunge and to be bruised and broken as he was.258 [B] Ask Philosophy what the Sky and the Sun are composed of; what will she answer, if not iron, or, [C] with Anaxagoras, [B] stone, or some such everyday material? If you ask Zeno what Nature is, he replies Fire – an artificer having as its properties generative powers and regularity; if you ask Archimedes (the master of geometry, that science which grants itself precedence over all others in matters of truth and certainty) he replies that the Sun is a god of burning iron. What a fine idea to come out of geometrical demonstrations, with their beauty and compelling necessities! Not so compelling [C] and useful, though, [B] but that [C] Socrates thought you only need to know enough geometry to survey any land given or acquired; [B] the illustrious Polyaenus (formerly a famous teacher of geometry) came to despise its demonstrations as false and manifestly vain; that was after tasting the sweet fruits of the idle gardens of Epicurus.259

[C] In Antiquity Anaxagoras was believed to have excelled all others in treating matters celestial and divine; but in Xenophon, Socrates, talking of his teaching, said that the brain of Anaxagoras finally became disturbed: that often happens to those who immoderately pore over matters which do not appertain to them.260

As for Anaxagoras’ making the Sun a burning stone, he failed to realize that stone does not glow in the fire, or, what is worse, that it is consumed by fire; as for his making the Sun and Fire one, he further failed to realize that fire does not blacken those who simply look at it, that we can gaze fixedly at fire, or that fire kills plants and grasses. Socrates’ verdict – and mine as well – is that the best judgement you can make about the heavens is not to make any at all.261

When Plato in the Timaeus was about to talk about daemons he declared: This is an undertaking which is beyond our range; we are obliged to have faith in men of old who said they were born of daemons: it is not reasonable to refuse to believe these children of the gods – even though what they say is not supported by compelling reasons or by verisimilitude – since they swear they are talking about matters known within their homes and families…262

[A] Now let us see whether we have a little more light than that concerning our knowledge of Man and Nature.

When treating objects which, by our own admission, exceed our knowledge, is it not stupid to go forging bodies for them and imposing on them false Forms of our own invention? – as in the case of the movement of the planets: since our minds cannot manage to conceive what makes them move naturally, we impose on them our own heavy corporeal, material principles:

temo aureus, aurea summae Curvatura rotae, radiorum argenteus ordo.

[The shaft was of gold; so too the rim of the wheels and the spokes were made of silver.]263

It is almost as though we had sent coach-smiths, carpenters [C] and painters [A] up there, preparing mechanical contrivances with diverse movements [C] and then, in accordance with Plato’s instructions, arranging, round about the spindle of Necessity, sets of wheels and interlaced courses for the heavenly bodies, variously painted.264

[B] Mundus domus est maxima rerum, Quam quinque altitonae fragmine zonae Cingunt, per quam limbus pictus bis sex signis Stellimicantibus, altus in obliquo aethere, lunae Bigas acceptat.

[The Universe is an edifice, immense, encircled by five thundering belts and crossed obliquely by an aethereal sash, decorated with twice half-dozen constellations and the paired horses of the Moon.]265

These are dreams [C] and frantic folly. [A] If only Nature would deign to open her breast one day and show us the means266 and the workings of her movements as they really are [C] (first preparing our eyes to see them). [A] O God, what fallacies and miscalculations we would find in our wretched science! [C] Either I am quite mistaken or our science has not put one single thing squarely in its rightful place, and I will leave this world knowing nothing better than my own ignorance. It was in Plato (was it not?) that I came across the inspired adage, ‘Nature is but enigmatic poetry,’ as if to say that Nature is intended to exercise our ingenuity, like a painting veiled in mists and obscured by an infinite variety of wrong lights.267 ‘Latent ista omnia crassis occultata et circumfusa tenebris, ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, quae penetrare in coelum, terram intrare possit’ [All things lie hidden, wrapped in a darkness so thick that no human mind is sharp enough to pierce the heavens or to sound the earth]. Certainly, philosophy is poetry adulterated by Sophists. Where do all those Ancient authors get their authority from, if not from the poets? The original authorities were themselves poets; they treated philosophy in terms of poetic art. Plato is but a disjointed poet. As an insult, Timon called him a great contriver of miracles.268

[A] When their natural teeth are missing, women use false ones made of ivory; they replace their real complexion by one contrived from borrowed materials; they pad out their thighs with cloth or felt, round out their bellies with cotton-wool and, as everyone knows and sees, enhance themselves with a false and borrowed beauty.

Learning does the same; [B] even our system of Law, they say, bases the truth of its justice upon legal fictions. Learning pays us in the coin of suppositions which she confesses she has invented herself. Those eccentric and concentric epicycles by which Astrology tries to make sense out of the motions of the heavenly bodies are presented to us merely as the best she can produce; all Philosophy does the same, presenting us not with what really is, nor even with what she believes to be true, but with the best probabilities and elegancy she has wrought.269 [C] Take Plato, explaining the attributes of the bodies of men and beasts, ‘We would be certain that what we say is true, if we could have it confirmed by an oracle; as it is, we can only be certain that I have spoken with the greatest appearance of truth that I can find.’270

[A] Philosophy does not only impose her ropes, wheels and contrivances on to the high heavens. Just think for a while what she says about the way we humans are constructed. For our tiny bodies she has forged as many retrogradations, trepidations, conjunctions, recessions and revolutions as she has for the stars and the planets. They are right to call our bodies Microcosms (‘little worlds’) seeing all the various pieces and angles they need to build them up and cement them together. To house all the activities which they find in Man and all the various functions and faculties which we are aware of within us, think of all the sections into which they have subdivided our souls and how many organs they have ascribed to them; think of all the storeys and levels and all the duties and activities they have assigned to us, over and above the natural ones which our poor humanity can actually perceive! They have invented an entire Republic! Man is an object to be seized and handled. Each philosopher, according to his fancy, has been left entirely free to unstitch him, rearrange him, put him together again and furnish him out afresh.

Yet even now they have not overmastered him. They cannot even dream up an ordinance for Man – let alone find out a true one – without there being some sound or cadence which they cannot quite fit in, however abnormal271 they make their contrivance and however much they try and botch it up with a thousand false and fantastical patches. [C] It is wrong to find excuses for them. We do indeed condone artists who represent the sky and far-off lands, seas, mountains or islands with a few slight brush-strokes; we do not know what they are like so are happy with the shadowy imitations that they feign; but when they paint from nature on a known subject – one which we are familiar with – we require of them a perfect, detailed representation of the lines and colours. If they fail, we despise them.272

[A] I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher Thales with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, made him trip over, to warn him that it was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet. It was certainly good advice she gave him, to study himself rather than the sky; [C] for, as Democritus says through the mouth of Cicero, ‘Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas’ [Nobody examines what is before his feet: they scrutinize the tracts of the heavens].

[A] But in fact, the human condition is such that, where our understanding is concerned, the things we hold in our hands are as far above the clouds as the heavenly bodies are! [C] As Socrates says in Plato, you can make against anyone concerned with Philosophy exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales: he fails to see what lies before his feet. No philosopher understands his neighbour’s actions nor even his own; he does not even know what either of them is in himself, beast or Man.273

[A] These people, now, who find Sebond’s arguments to be too feeble, these know-alls who are ignorant of nothing and make rules for the whole Universe –

Quae mare compescant causae; quid temperet annum; Stellae sponte sua jussaeve vagentur et errent; Quid premat obscurum lunae, quid proferat orbem; Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors;

[What limits the seas to their confines, what regulates the years: whether the heavenly bodies travel and wander freely or by constraint; what makes the dark orb of the Moon to wax or wane, or what the discordant concord of all things can mean or bring about]274 –

have they never, among all their books, plumbed the difficulties which confront them in understanding their own being? Some things can be seen easily enough: our finger and foot are capable of motion; some of our members move on their own while others move only when we make them do so; certain impressions produce a blush, others pallor; some thoughts act on the spleen, others on the brain; some make us laugh, others weep; some stun our minds into ecstasies and arrest the movements of our limbs; [C] there are objects which make our gorges rise, others which raise up something lower down. [A] But no man has yet discovered how purely mental impressions like these can effect such deep incursions into objects as massively solid as our bodies nor the nature of the linking sutures by which these astonishing stimuli are transmitted: [C] ‘Omnia incerta ratione et in naturae majestate abdita’ [All things remain unknown to reason and are hidden in the majesty of Nature], says Pliny; and St Augustine: ‘Modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus, omnino mirus est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest: et hoc ipse homo est’ [How the spirit adheres to the body is entirely a matter of wonder and cannot be understood by Man; nevertheless this union of body and spirit is Man].275

[A] And yet everybody knows the answer! Merely human opinions become accepted when derived from ancient beliefs, and are taken on authority and trust like religion or law! We parrot whatever opinions are commonly held, accepting them as truths, with all the paraphernalia of supporting arguments and proofs, as though they were something firm and solid; nobody tries to shake them; nobody tries to refute them. On the contrary, everybody vies with each other to plaster over the cracks and prop up received beliefs with all his powers of reason – a supple instrument which can be turned on the lathe into any shape at all. Thus the world is pickled in stupidity and brimming over with lies.

We do not doubt much, because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches. We do not ask whether any statement is true, but what it has been taken to mean. We ask whether Galen said this or said that: we never ask whether he said anything valid.

It is understandable that this curb on our freedom of judgement and this tyranny over our beliefs should spread to include the universities and the sciences: Aristotle is the god of scholastic science: it is heresy to discuss his commandments (as it once was to discuss those of Lycurgus in Sparta). What Aristotle taught is professed as law – yet like any other doctrine it may be false. Where the first principles of Nature are concerned I cannot see why I should not accept, as soon as the opinions of Aristotle, the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, the atoms of Epicurus, the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, the water of Thales, the infinity of Nature of Anaximander, or the aether of Diogenes, the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, the infinity of Parmenides, the Unity of Musaeus, the fire and water of Apollodorus, the homogeneous particles of Anaxagoras, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion drawn from the boundless confusion of judgement and doctrines produced by our fine human reason, with all its certainty and perspicuity, when it turns its attention to anything whatever.

Aristotle based the principles of Nature on three elements: matter, form and privation. Yet what is more silly than actually to make a vacuum into one of the causes of the production of material objects? Privation is a negative: what fanciful humour led Aristotle to make it the original cause of objects which actually exist? Yet, except as an exercise in logic, nobody dares to shake that belief. Nobody debates anything to increase doubt but only to defend the founding author of their school against outside objections; his authority marks the goal; beyond it, no further inquiry is permitted.276

Base yourself on admitted postulates and you can build up any case you like; from the rules which order the original principles the remainder of your construction will follow on easily without self-contradiction.

This method allows us to bowl our arguments with the jack in view (and so be satisfied that our foundations are rational ones); before they even begin, our professors (like geometricians with their postulated axioms) establish such a hold over our beliefs that they can subsequently reach any conclusion they want. We give them our agreement and consent: they can then pull us this way and that way, spinning us about at will. Once we accept anyone’s postulates he becomes our professor and our god: for his foundations he will grab territory so ample and so easy that, if he so wishes, he will drag us up to the clouds. In the practice and business of scholarship we have accepted Pythagoras’ contention as legal tender: every expert, he says, must be believed in his own speciality. So, for the meaning of words the logician turns to the grammarian; for the matter of his arguments the rhetorician borrows from the logician; the poet takes his rhythms from the musician; the geometer takes his propositions from the arithmetician; the metaphysicians make their foundations out of the conjectures of physics. For their principles, all branches of learning take admitted postulates, which restrain human judgement on every side. If you come up against the barrier behind which their error of principle is sheltering, they have an axiom ready on their lips: Never argue with those who deny first principles.277 But there can be no first principles unless God has revealed them; all the rest – beginning, middle and end – is dream and vapour.

Whenever a case is fought from preliminary assumptions, to oppose it take the very axiom which is in dispute, reverse it and make that into your preliminary assumption. For any human assumption, any rhetorical proposition, has just as much authority as any other, unless a difference can be established by reason. So they must all be weighed in the balance – starting with general principles and any tyrannous ones. [C] To be convinced of certainty is certain evidence of madness and of extreme unsureness: no people are more insane or less philosophical than the ‘lovers of opinion’ whom Plato dubbed philodoxoi.278 [A] We want to find out by reason whether fire is hot, whether snow is white, whether anything within our knowledge is hard or soft. There are ancient stories of the replies made to the man who doubted whether heat exists – they told him to jump into the fire – or to the one who doubted whether ice is cold – they told him to slip some into his bosom: but a reply like that is quite unworthy of the professed aims of philosophy. Philosophers could have spoken in this way only if they had left us in a state of nature, simply accepting external appearances as they offer themselves to our senses, or if they had left us to follow our basic appetites, governed only by such modes of being as we are born with. But they themselves have taught us to make judgements about the universe; they themselves have fed us with the notion that human reason is the Comptroller-General of everything within and without the vault of heaven; they themselves say that it can embrace everything, do everything and is the means by which anything is known or understood. Such replies would be good among the Cannibals who live long and happy lives, in peace and tranquility, without the benefits of Aristotle’s precepts and without even knowing what the word ‘physics’ means. Perhaps such a reply could even be better and more firmly based than all the ones which philosophers owe to reason or discovery. Such arguments would be within the capacity of ourselves, of all the animals and of all for whom the pure and simple law of Nature still holds sway. But they themselves have renounced such arguments. They must not tell me: ‘This is true; you can see it is; you can feel it is.’ What they must tell me is whether I really and truly feel what I think I feel; and if I do feel it, they must go on and tell me why and how and what: let them tell me the name, origin, connections and frontiers of heat or of cold and what qualities are found in the agents and patients of heat and of cold. Otherwise, let them abandon their professional intention, which is to accept nothing and approve nothing except by following the ways of reason. When they have to assay anything, reason is their touchstone. But it is, a most surely, a touchstone full of falsehood, error, defects and feebleness. How better to test that than by reason itself. If we cannot trust reason when talking about itself, it can hardly be a judge of anything outside itself.

If human reason knows anything at all, it must be its own essence and its own domicile. It is domiciled within the soul, being either a part of it or one of its activities – as for the permanent home of that true and essential Reason, whose name we steal under false colours, it is in the bosom of God: that is the habitation where it dwells; that is where it comes from when it pleases God to allow us to have a glimmer of Reason, like Pallas leaping from the head of her Father to make herself known unto the world.

Now let us see what human reason can tell us about itself and about the soul! [C] I am not talking now of that generic soul, in which virtually all philosophy makes the heavenly bodies and the elements to share; nor of that soul which Thales, prompted by his study of the magnet, attributes to objects normally considered inanimate; I am concerned with the soul which belongs to us, the one we should know best:

[B] Ignoratur enim quae sit natura animai, Nata sit, an contra nascentibus insinuetur, Et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta, An tenebras orci visat vastasque lacunas, An pecudes alias divinitus insinuet se.

[The nature of the soul is not known; whether it is innate or, on the contrary, slipped into creatures at the moment of their birth; does it die when we die, does it visit the darkness and the vast depths of Orcus, or else does it, under divine guidance, slip into animals different from ouselves?]279

[A] Reason taught Crates and Dicaearchus that there is no soul (bodies being endowed with natural power of movement); it taught Plato that the soul is a self-moving substance; Thales, that soul is a natural substance, never in repose; Asclepiades, an exercising of the senses; Hesiod and Anaximander, a substance composed of fire and water; Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of blood:

– Sanguineam vomit ille animam

[He vomits up his soul of blood]–

Possidonius, Cleanthes and Galen, that the soul is heat or a hot complexion –

Igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis origo [Souls have a fiery vigour and a heavenly origin] –

Hippocrates, a spirit spread throughout the body; Varro, air, infused through the mouth, warmed in the lungs, refreshed in the heart and spread throughout the body; Zeno, the quintessence of four elements; Heraclides of Pontus, light; Xenocrates and the Egyptians, number in motion; the Chaldeans, a power of indeterminate form:

[B] habitum quemdam vitalem corporis esse, Harmoniam Graeci quam dicunt.

[There is a certain life-giving quality in the body which the Greeks call Harmony.]280

[A] And let us not overlook Aristotle, who said the soul was that power which naturally moved the body and which he called entelechia (as dull an idea as anyone else’s, for he does not mention the essence, origin or nature of the soul but merely notes what it does). Lactantius, Seneca and the better part of the Dogmatists all confessed that they did not know what it was. [C] And after running through all these opinions, Cicero comments: ‘Harum sententiarum quae vera sit, deus aliquis viderit’ [It is up to some god or other to say which of these is true]. [A] ‘I know from myself’, said St Bernard, ‘how incomprehensible God is: I cannot even comprehend the constituents of my own being.’ [C] Heraclitus held that everything is full of souls and daemons; he nevertheless maintained that whatever advances we may make in our knowledge of the soul, we would never get to the end, since its essence is too profound.281

[A] There is just as much disagreement and argument about the seat of the soul: Hippocrates and Hierophilus lodge it in the ventricle of the brain; Democritus and Aristotle, throughout the body –

[B] Ut bona saepe valetudo cum dicitur esse Corporis, et non est tarnen haec pars ulla valentis.

[As we often say that a man has a healthy body, without implying that health is part of a healthy man.] –

[A] Epicurus lodges it in the stomach –

[B] Hic exultat enim pavor ac metus, haec loca circum Laetitiae mulcent;

[For terror and fear make the stomach tremble, while joys soothe its pains;]282

[A] the Stoics lodge it within and around the heart; Erasistratus, adjoining the membrane of the epicranium; Empedocles, in the blood – like Moses, who for this reason forbade men to ‘eat the blood’ of beasts (whose soul is within the blood);283 Galen thought that each part of the body had its own soul; Strato lodged it between the eyebrows: [C] ‘Qua facie quidem sit animus, aut ubi habitet, ne quaerendum quidem est’ [As for the aspect of the soul and the place wherein it dwells, we should not even try to inquire]. – I gladly let that fellow Cicero use his own words (should I dare to contaminate the utterances of Eloquence!) and there is little to gain from stealing the substance of his own ideas, which are neither frequent, sound nor unknown.284

[A] But the reason which led Chrysippus and others of his sect to make a case out for the heart is not to be forgotten: it is (he says) because, when we want to swear an oath, we place our hand upon our bosom, and when we want to pronounce the word έγω (which means ‘I’) we lower our jaw towards our chest. This passage should not be allowed to slip by without a remark about such silliness in so great a person. Even if you leave aside the total lack of weight in the argument as such, his last proof could only convince Greeks that their soul is where he said it is. No man’s judgement is so alert as never to nod off to sleep!285 [C] Why are we afraid to say so? Here are the Stoics, the fathers of human wisdom, finding that, when a man is buried under the weight of a fallen building, his soul cannot extricate itself but makes lengthy struggles to get free – like a mouse in a trap!

Some286 maintain that the world was made specifically to give bodies to souls, as a punishment for having wilfully fallen from their original purity; at first they were simply incorporeal; they are given light or heavy bodies, depending upon how far they have withdrawn from their original spiritual state (which explains the great variety of created matter). The spirit who, as a punishment, was invested with the body of the Sun must have fallen off in some very rare and special way!

The frontiers of our research are lost in dazzling light. Plutarch, writing of the fountain-heads of history, says that when we push our investigations to extremes, they all fall into vagueness, rather like maps where the margins of known lands are filled in with marshes, deep forests, deserts and uninhabitable places.287 That explains why the most gross and puerile of rhapsodies are to be found among thinkers who penetrate most deeply into the highest matters: they are engulfed by their curiosity and their arrogance.

The beginnings and the ends of our knowledge are equally marked by an animal-like stupor: witness Plato’s soarings aloft in clouds of poetry and the babble of the gods to be found in his works. Whatever was he thinking about when he [A] defined Man as an animate creature with two legs and no feathers? He furnished those who wanted to laugh at him with an amusing opportunity for doing so. For, having plucked a live capon, they went about calling it ‘Plato’s Man’.288

And the Epicureans too. With what simple-mindedness they first imagined that the universe had been formed by their atoms (which, they said, were bodies having some weight and a natural downward movement) until their opponents reminded them that, by their own description, it was impossible for these atoms to link up together: their fall, being straight and perpendicular, could only be effected along parallel lines. This obliged them to add a quite fortuitous sideways motion, and to furnish their atoms with curved hooks on their tails by which they could link themselves firmly to each other. [C] Even then, they were in trouble from others, who hounded them with another consideration: if atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?

That which is capable of reasoning, argued Zeno, is superior to that which is not: nothing is superior to the Universe, therefore the Universe is capable of reasoning. Cotta used the same argument to make the Universe into a mathematician and another argument of Zeno’s to make it into a musician – an organist. The whole is greater than the part: we, who are parts of the Universe, are capable of wisdom: therefore the Universe is wise.289

[A] One can find innumerable examples290 of similar arguments which are not only false but inept and unable to hold together, emphasizing that their inventors were not so much ignorant as silly; you can find them in the criticisms which philosophers make of each other in their clashes of opinion and in the disagreements between Schools.

[C] Anyone who made an intelligent collection of the asinine stupidities of human Wisdom would have a wondrous tale to tell. I like collecting such things as evidence which, from some angles, can be studied as usefully as sane and moderate opinions. [A] We can judge what we should think of Man, of his sense and of his reason, when we find such obvious and gross errors even in these important characters who have raised human intelligence to great heights. Personally I prefer to believe that they treated knowledge haphazardly, sporting with it, in any fashion, like a toy and that they played with reason as if it were some vain and frivolous instrument, putting forward all kinds of thoughts and fantasies, some forceful, others, weak. The selfsame Plato who defined Man as a capon, elsewhere follows Socrates and says that, in truth, he does not know what Man is, and that Man is one of the hardest things in the world to understand.291 With such varied and unstable opinions they lead us tacitly by the hand to inconclusive conclusions. They profess that they do not present the face of their thought openly and unveiled; they hide it beneath obscurities of poetic fable or behind some other mask. Our imperfection is such that raw meat is not always proper food for our stomachs: it first has to be dried, treated or hung. They do the same: they sometimes take their straightforward opinions and judgements and hide them behind obscurity [C] and season them with falsehood, [A] so as to prepare them for public consumption. They do not want to make an express avowal of the ignorance and weakness of human reason – [C] they want to avoid frightening the children – [A] but they give us a good glimpse of it beneath the appearance of confused and unstable erudition.

[B] when I was in Italy, I advised a man who was at pains to learn Italian that if it were merely to be understood, without excelling in any other way, he should simply use the first words which came to his lips, Latin, French, Spanish or Gascon, and stick an Italian ending on them; he would never fail to hit on some local dialect, Tuscan, Roman, Venetian, Piedmontese or Neapolitan: there are so many forms that he was bound to coincide with one of them. I say the same about Philosophy. She has so many faces, so much variety and has been so garrulous, that all our ravings and our dreams may be found within her. Human fancy can conceive nothing, good or evil, which is not there already. [C] ‘Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum’ [Nothing can be so absurd that it has not already been said by one of the philosophers].292 [B] So I am all the more ready to give a free run to my own whims in public: I know they were born to me, not modelled on others, but you can always find some Ancient or other whose fantasies are akin to them. There will always be somebody to say, ‘Look, he got it from there.’

[C] My ways of life are natural to me: in forming them I have never never called in the help of any erudite discipline; but when I was seized with the desire to give a public account of them, weak as they are, I made it my duty to help them along with precepts and examples, so that I could publish them more decorously. I was then astonished myself to find that, by sheer chance, they were in conformity with so many philosophical examples and precepts. Only after my life was settled in its activity did I learn which philosophy was governing it! A new character: a chance philosopher, not a premeditated one!

[A] To get back to our souls,293 Plato placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart, desire in the liver; but that probably resulted from an interpretation of the emotions of the soul rather than from any desire to divide the soul up into separate parts; it was more like one body with several members. The most likely of all these opinions states that the human soul is one single entity with the faculties for ratiocinating, remembering, comprehending, judging and desiring; it exercises its other functions through the instrumentality of the various parts of the body (just as the seaman sails his vessel according to his experience of it, at times tightening or slackening a sheet, at others hoisting the yard or pulling the oar, one single power organizing all these actions); the seat of this power is the brain, as is clearly shown by the fact that wounds and accidents affecting the head immediately harm the faculties of the soul; it is not inappropriate, therefore, that this power should extend from the brain to the rest of the body294 –

[C] medium non deserit unquam Coeli Phoebus iter; radiis tamen omnia lustrat.

[Phoebus never deserts his path through the sky, yet bathes all things with light from his rays] –

just as the Sun in the sky pours out its light and its powers and fills the whole universe:

Caetera pars animae per totum dissita corpus Paret, et ad numen mentis nomenque movetur.

[The remainder of the soul, scattered throughout the body, obeys, and is activated by the majesty and authority of the mind.]295

Some said that there is a general Soul, like some huge body, from which individual souls were extracted, later returning there to be re-absorbed in that universal matter:

Deum namque ire per omnes Terrasque tractusque maris coelumque profundum: Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum, Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas; Scilicet huc reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri Omnia: nec morti esse locum;

[For God is said to spread through all lands, all tracts of sea and highest heaven; from him all flocks and herds and men and every race of beast all take, at birth, their tenuous lives, and to him all things eventually return, when they are loosened asunder: and so there is no place at all for death;]296

others said that the individual souls merely rejoined this general Soul – attached to it, but as individuals; others said that souls were produced from the divine substance itself; others, from fire and water, by angels; some said they existed from the earliest times; others, that they were created only when actually required. Some said they came down from the circle of the Moon and later returned there. Most of the Ancients held that, exactly like all other natural things, they were engendered from father to son, adducing as an argument the resemblance of sons to their fathers:297

Instillata patris virtus tibi: Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis.

[Your father’s virtue is transmitted to you; strong men are born from strong men and good.]298

Not only physical characteristics were held to flow like this from father to son but similar humours, complexions and inclinations of the soul:

Denique cur acris violentia triste leonum Seminium sequitur; dolus vulpibus, et fuga cervis A patribus datur, et patrius pavor incitat artus; Si non certa suo quia semine seminioque Vis animi pariter crescit cum corpore toto?

[Finally, why is impetuous ferocity the hereditary mark of the dire lion family, trickery of the fox and swiftness of the deer (which inherits the paternal instinct towards timorous flight) if not because the soul is born from semen and grows with the rest of the body?]

This was held to be the basis of divine Justice which readily visits upon the children the sins of the fathers, because the pollution of the fathers’ vices is to some extent imprinted upon the souls of their children, who are influenced by their fathers’ unruly desires.299

Moreover if souls do not come from natural succession but by some other way – if, say, they existed beforehand as entities independent of their bodies – they would have had some memory of their former state, given that reflection, reason and memory are the natural properties of the soul:

[B] si in corpus nascentibus insinuatur, Cur superante actam aetatem meminisse nequimus, Nec vestigia gestarum rerum ulla tenemus?

[If souls are only introduced into the bodies at birth, why cannot we fully remember what happened before nor retain any trace of the things which we did?]300

[A] If we are to give the value we wish to the attributes of our souls, we are obliged to assume that, even in their natural simplicity and purity, they are full of knowledge; free from the prison of the body, our souls, therefore, must be such, before they entered their bodies, as we hope they will be once they have gone forth from them; so, while they are in the body, they must continue to remember that knowledge: hence Plato’s assertion that whatever we learn is really the recollection of what we once knew. But we all know that to be false from our own experience. First: we remember nothing save what we have been taught; if memory did its duty ‘purely’, it would at least hint at something beyond our apprenticed knowledge. Second: what the soul knew in her pure state was true knowledge: since her intelligence was divine, she knew things as they really are; here below you can make the soul accept lies and errors, if you teach them to her. She cannot be using her powers of recollection in that case, since she had never accommodated such Forms and concepts!

But to say that her imprisonment in the body smothers her native faculties so completely as to snuff them right out, runs, first of all, contrary to that other belief: that we can recognize her powers to be so great, and those of her workings which we are conscious of in this life to be so wonderful, that they allow us to conclude that she is divine, has existed from all eternity and will enjoy immortality.

[B] Nam, si tantopere est animi mutata potestas Omnis ut actarum exciderit retinentia rerum, Non, ut opinor, ea ab leto jam longior errat.

[For if all the faculties of the soul are so completely changed that no memory of the past remains, that seems to me to be no different from extinction.]301

[A] Moreover, the powers and actions of our souls must be examined not elsewhere but here, at home in our bodies. Any other perfections they may have are useless and irrelevant; it is for their present state that their whole immortality will receive its acknowledged rewards: each is entirely accountable for the life of a human being. But it would be an act of gross injustice to lop off the soul’s powers and resources, to strip her of all her weapons and then to take the very time when she lies weak and ill in prison – a time of repression and constraint – and to make that the basis for a judgement leading to endless, everlasting punishment; it would be unjust to limit consideration to so short a span, to a life that may have lasted a mere two hours or, at the very worst a hundred years – an instant in proportion to infinity – and then, from that momentary interlude, to order and establish, once and for all, the whole state of her future existence. To reward or punish on the basis of so short a life would be disproportionate and iniquitous.

[C] To get out of this difficulty, Plato wants future rewards and punishments never to exceed a hundred years and always to be proportionate to the actual length of a man’s life. Quite a few Christians too have imposed temporal limits on to them.302

[A] As a result of all this men followed Epicurus and Democritus (whose opinions were most widely received); they concluded that the generation and life of the soul shared all the usual characteristics of things human. Many striking features make this seem probable: they could see that the soul was born precisely when the body was capable of receiving her; that her strength increased as the body’s did: it was observed that the soul was weak in infancy and then, eventually, experienced a vigorous maturity, a decline into old age and, finally, decrepitude:

gigni pariter cum corpore, et una Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.

[We can feel that the soul is born with the body, grows up with it and then grows old.]303

Man perceived that the soul can experience various passions and be disturbed by several emotions which subject her to pain and lassitude; she is capable of change, including change for the worse; she is capable of joy, tranquillity, languor; like the stomach or the foot, she is subject to wounds and illness:

[B] mentem sanari, corpus ut aegrum Cemimus, et flecti medicina posse videmus.

[We see that the mind can be cured like the body and be modified by drugs.]

[A] She can be confused and dazed by the powers of wine, be upset by the vapours of a burning fever; be lulled to sleep by certain drugs and aroused by others:

[B] corpoream naturam animi esse necesse est, Corporeis quoniam telis ictuque laborat.

[The nature of the mind is necessarily corporeal, for it can be hurt by physical cuts and blows.]

[A] Men saw that all the soul’s faculties can be stunned and overthrown by the mere bite of a sick dog; that the soul has no way of avoiding any of these accidents, even by showing the utmost firmness of mind or any moral quality or virtue, by philosophical determination or by any straining of her forces. Let the saliva of some wretched dog slaver over the hand of Socrates and they knew that it would put a sudden end to all his wisdom and to all his mighty, disciplined thought, reducing them to nothing, so that no trace whatever would remain of his original awareness:

[B] vis animai

Conturbatur,… et divisa seorsum Disjectatur, eodem illo distracta veneno.

[The power of the soul is disturbed and its parts are broken up and dispersed by that same poison.]

[A] They knew that the poison would find no greater powers of resistance in his soul than in a four-year-old’s: if Philosophy herself became incarnate, such a poison would make her lose her senses and drive her insane. Cato could wring the neck of Death and Destiny, but if ever he had been bitten by a mad dog and contracted that illness which doctors call hydroforbia,304 even he would have been overcome with fear and terror, quite unable to bear the sight of water or a looking-glass.

[B] vis morbi distracta per artus Turbat agens animam, spumantes aequore salso Ventorum ut validis fervescunt viribus undae.

[The power of the disease spreading through one’s limbs drives the soul to distraction, like stormy winds lashing the waves of the troubled sea.]

[A] While we are on this subject, Philosophy has armed Man well against all the other ills which may befall him, teaching him either to bear them or else, if the cost of that is too high, to inflict certain defeat on them by escaping from all sensation. But such methods can only be of service to a vigorous soul in control of herself, a soul capable of reason and decision: they are no use in a disaster such as this, where the soul of a philosopher becomes the soul of a madman, confused, lost and deranged. This can happen from several causes: by some excessive emotion which snatches the mind away; by some strong passion engendered by the soul herself; by a wound in certain parts of the body; by a gastric vapour subjecting the soul to giddiness and confusion:

[B] morbis in corporis, avius errat Saepe animus: dementit enim, deliraque fatur; Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum Aeternumque soporem, oculis nutuque cadenti.

[During physical illness, the soul often goes astray, becoming mad and talking deliriously; sometimes it plunges into a deep lethargy, into a perpetual sleep, as the eyes close and the head droops down.]

[A] Philosophers, it seems to me, have hardly begun to pluck that particular chord; [C] no more than another one of similar importance. To console us in our mortal state they constantly present us with the following dilemma: the soul is either mortal or immortal; if mortal, she will be without pain; if immortal she will go on improving. But they never touch on the other alternative. What if she goes on getting worse! They simply hand threats of further punishment over to the poets. But that game is far too easy.

I am often struck by these two omissions in their argument: I now go back to the first. [A] The deranged soul loses all taste for the Sovereign Good of the Stoics, so constant and so resolute. On this point our wisdom, fair though she is, really must surrender and lay down her arms.

Meanwhile the vanity of human reason led philosophers to conclude that a composite being, linking in fellowship two elements as diverse as mortal body and immortal soul, is quite inconceivable.

Quippe etenim mortale aeterno jungere, et una Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse, Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est, Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque, Quam mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni Junctum, in concilio saevas tolerare procellas?

[It is mad to think that the mortal is able to be joined to the eternal, to agree together and each to help the other. What can we possibly conceive more different, or, rather, more contrary and incompatible, than these two elements, one mortal, the other immortal and eternal, which you would join together to ride out the wildest storm?]

Moreover the soul, like the body, was thought to be involved in death,

[B] Simul aevo fessa fatiscit. [She droops down, tired out with age.]

[C] According to Zeno this is shown to us clearly by the image of sleep (which he thought was both the soul and the body dropping down in a faint): ‘Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat atque concidere’ [He conceived that the soul contracts, as it were, collapses and falls down in a swoon].305

[A] It was recognized that the soul may sometimes retain her force and vigour to the end; that was explained by the different varieties of illness, just as some men retain one or other of their senses intact to the end – their hearing, say, or their sense of touch – nobody being so enfeebled as to have absolutely no part vigorous and whole.

[B] Non alio pacto quam si, pes cum dolet aegri, In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore.

[In the same way, a sick man’s feet may feel sharp pains, without his head feeling anything.]306

Our mental insight is to Truth what an owl’s eyes are to the splendour of the sun. Aristotle says that. Is there any better way of convicting ourselves than by noting such total blindness in so clear a light?

[A] Now for the contrary opinion: that the soul is in fact immortal. [C] Cicero says that, at least as far as books are concerned, it was first introduced by Pherecides of Scyros in the time of King Tullus. Some others attribute it to Thales, and there are other candidates.307 [A] This branch of human learning is treated with the greatest reservation and doubt. On this matter, even the most confirmed Dogmatists are mainly constrained to shelter behind the shadowy teachings of Plato’s Academy. On this subject, nobody knows what Aristotle’s conclusions were, [C] no more than those of the Ancients in general, who handle the matter with a kind of vacillating belief: ‘rem gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium’ [a thing most pleasing, but more in promise than in proof].308 [A] Aristotle hid behind a cloud of difficult and incomprehensible words and meanings, leaving his followers arguing as much about what he meant as about the matter itself.

Two considerations made this opinion plausible to them: first, that without the immortality of the soul, fame would have no secure basis and so be hoped for in vain. (By the standards of the world that is a consideration of wonderful importance.) The second is one of utility: it is useful that people should be convinced, [C] as Plato says, [A] that even when vices escape the dark and uncertain vigilance of human justice, they still remain exposed to that of divine Justice which will pursue them even after the death of the guilty.309 [C] Man takes extreme care to prolong his being, providing for it by all possible means: he has tombs to preserve his body and fame to preserve his soul.

Dissatisfied with his lot, Man has given free run to his opinions, building himself up into something else and propping himself up with his own ingenuity. The soul can never find a sure footing; she is too confused and weak for that. She roams about seeking bases for her hopes and consolations in conditions which are foreign to her nature. She clings to them and puts down roots. These notions which she ingeniously forges for herself may be ever so frivolous and fantastic, but she can find repose in them more surely than in herself, and much more willingly. [A] But it is a source of wonder that even those who are most obstinately attached to so just and clear a persuasion as spiritual immortality fall short, being powerless to establish it by their human ability. [C] One Ancient writer said, ‘Somnia sunt non docentis, sed optantis’ [They are not the dreams of one who demonstrates but of one who desires].310 [A] From this evidence Man realizes that such truth as he does find out for himself is due to Fortune and to chance. Even when truth drops into his hands, Man has no means of seizing hold of it; his reason does not have power enough to establish any rights over it. Every single idea which results from our own reflections and our own faculties – whether it is true or false – is subject to dispute and uncertainty. In bygone days God produced the confusion and disorder of the Tower of Babel as a chastisement of our pride, to teach us our wretchedness and our inadequacy. Everything we undertake without God’s help, everything we try and see without the lamp of his grace, is vanity and madness. The essence of Truth is to be constant and uniform: when Fortune arranges for a little of it to come into our possession, out of weakness we corrupt it and debase it. Any course a man may adopt on his own is allowed by God to lead to this same confusion, the idea of which is so vividly portrayed in the just punishment which God visited upon the arrogance of Nembroth, bringing to nought his vain attempts to build that pyramidal Tower: [C] ‘Perdam sapientiam sapientium et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo’ [I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will reject]. [A] That diversifying of tongues and language by which God threw confusion over the enterprise of Babel, what else does it signify if not the infinite, endless altercation over discordant opinions and arguments which accompanies the vain structures of human knowledge, enmeshing them in confusion. [C] Usefully enmeshing them! If we actually possessed one grain of knowledge, there would be no holding us back. I like what that Saint said: ‘Ipsa utilitatis occultatio, aut humilitatis exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio’ [Even that which is useful has been rendered obscure: that provides an occasion for exercising our humility and restraining our pride]. To what degree of arrogance and insolence do we not carry our blindness and our brutish stupidity.311

[A] But to get back to our subject: it is truly reasonable that we should be beholden to God alone, to the benefit of his grace, for the truth of so excellent a belief: it is from God’s bountiful liberality that we receive the fruition of everlasting life, which is the enjoyment of eternal blessedness.

[C] We should freely admit that God alone tells us this, and faith.312 It is not a lesson we have been taught by Nature or Reason. Anyone who makes repeated examinations of himself, internally and externally, as a human being, with human powers but bereft of the divine privilege of grace; anyone who sees Man as he is, without flattery, will find no quality or faculty in Man which is not redolent of death and dust. The more we attribute, grant and refer to God, the more Christianly we act. Would the Stoic philosopher not be better advised to owe to God what he said he owed to the chance agreement of the Voice of the People? ‘Cum de animarum aeternitate disserimus, non leve momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut colentium. Utor hac publica persuasione’ [When treating the immortality of the soul we attach no little weight to the general agreement among those who fear or worship the gods of the Underworld. I make good use of this general conviction].313

[A] The feebleness of human reasoning on this subject is particularly noticeable from the fabulous details which men have added to it in their efforts to discover the characteristics of our future immortality. [C] We may leave aside the Stoics, who grant that souls do have a future life, but only a finite one: ‘usuram nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus: diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant’ [They allow us to live as long as crows: our souls last a long time, they say, but not for ever].314

[A] The most universally received opinion (which still subsists today in some places) was the one attributed to Pythagoras – (not that he was the first to hold it, but because his approval and authority gave great weight and credence to it); it was that our souls, when they depart from us, go the rounds from one body to another, from a lion, say, say, to a horse; from a horse, to a king, ceaselessly driven from one abode to another.315 [C] Pythagoras said he distinctly remembered having previously been Aethalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus and finally Pyrrhus, before his soul eventually passed into himself, with recollections covering two hundred and six years.

Some added that these souls sometimes go back to heaven, and then come down again:

O pater, anne aliquas ad coelum hinc ire putandum est Sublimes animas iterumque ad tarda reverti Corpora? Quae lucis miseris tam dira cupido?

[O Father, must we believe that some exalted souls go from here to heaven and then come back again to sluggish bodies? Why do those wretches still yearn for the light of day?]316

Origen has souls everlastingly shuttling back and forth between wretchedness and bliss. Varro’s opinion relates how souls rejoin their original bodies after four hundred and forty years have rolled; for Chrysippus that happens after an undefined period.317 Plato says that it was from Pindar and the old poets that he acquired his belief in the endless succession of changes by which the soul is purified (in the World to Come her rewards and punishments are temporary, since her life on earth is lived within time); he drew the conclusion that the soul must possess a detailed knowledge of the affairs of heaven, hell and earth (having sojourned in them during her many journeys to and fro): for her, It is a matter of recollection.318

Elsewhere, the soul’s progression is like this: if a man has lived well he joins the star to which he is assigned; if badly, he becomes a woman; if even then he does not amend, he changes once more, this time into a beast with attributes appropriate to his vices; he will know no end to his punishments until he returns to his native condition, having rid himself, by force of reason, from all the gross, dull and material qualities within him.319

[A] But I must not forget the objection raised by the Epicureans against this transmigration of souls from body to body. It is quite entertaining. They pose the question: What order could be maintained if the crowds of the dying proved greater than the number being born? The souls turned out of house and home would all be jostling each other, trying to be the first to get into their new containers! They also ask how souls would spend their time while waiting for their new lodgings to be got ready. The Epicureans maintain that if, at the other extreme, more animate creatures were born than died, their bodies would be in a parlous state, having to wait for souls to be poured into them: some would die before they had started to live:

Denique connubia ad veneris partusque ferarum Esse animas praesto deridiculum esse videtur, Et spectare immortales mortalia membra Innumero numero, certareque praeproperanter Inter se, quae prima potissimaque insinuetur.

[It seems absurd that souls should have to wait for the connubial embraces and parturitions of beasts – innumerable immortal beings looking out for mortal limbs and struggling among themselves to see who is strong enough to slip in first.]320

Others make our souls remain in the body after death, so as to animate the snakes, worms and other creatures which are said to be produced by spontaneous generation in our rotting flesh or even from our ashes. Others split the soul into two parts, mortal and immortal. Others make it corporeal yet immortal. Others make it immortal, but without knowledge or awareness. There have been those who thought that the souls of the damned become devils [C] (and some of us Christians have thought that, too). [A] Similarly, Plutarch thinks that those who are saved become gods. There are few things that Plutarch asserts with more conviction (everywhere else his manner is one of sustained doubt and indecision). ‘We must think’, he says, ‘and firmly believe that the souls of men who have been virtuous by the standards of Nature and divine Justice, change from men into saints and from saints into demi-gods; finally these demi-gods become gods, once they are perfectly cleansed and purified (as in the sacrifices of purgation), and delivered in this way from death and passability. They do not become gods by some decree of the Senate but are gods in very truth, such as one could rationally expect them to be, full and perfect gods, to whom is granted a most blessed and most glorious apotheosis.’321 Plutarch is the most reticent and most moderate of the whole bunch, but if you would like to see him indulging in some bolder skirmishing and spinning some miraculous yarns about all this, I refer you to his treatises On the Moon and On the Daemon of Socrates; there, more clearly than anywhere, you can confirm that the mysteries of philosophy have plenty of oddities in common with poetry; human understanding in its strivings to plumb the depths of everything and to give an account of it, destroys itself, just as we ourselves, tired and exhausted by life’s long race, fall back into childishness.322

With that we come to the end of all the fine doctrines which we can distill from human science about our souls.

There is no less rashness in what science tells us about our bodily parts. We had better choose one or two examples, otherwise we shall drown in the vast and troubled sea of medical error. We can at least find out whether there is any agreement over the material from which Man reproduces himself.323

[C] As for the way Man was originally produced, that is a very deep and ancient problem: small wonder, then, that it leaves the human mind troubled and distraught. Archelaus the natural philosopher of whom Socrates was the disciple (and, according to Aristoxenus, the paramour) taught that men and animals were made of milky sludge, exuded from the earth under the influence of heat.

[A] Pythagoras said that our semen is the foam of our purest blood; Plato, a liquid draining from the marrow of the spinal column (supporting this with the argument that our backs are the first of our members to feel tired when we are on the job); Alcmeon says it is a part of the substance of the brain (proving this by the fact that men’s vision becomes troubled when they work immoderately at that particular exercise); for Democritus it is a substance extracted from the whole mass of the body; for Epicurus, a substance extracted from the soul as well as from the body; for Aristotle, the final excretion drawn from the nutriment of blood which spreads through all our limbs; for others it is concocted blood, digested by heat in the testicles – because extreme exertions can make us ejaculate drops of blood: there may be a little more probability here if, that is, any probability at all can be drawn from confusion so infinite.

How does this semen achieve its purpose? Opinions are as numerous and as contradictory. Aristotle and Democritus hold that women have no semen, but only a kind of sweat which they exude when they bounce about in the heat of their enjoyment: it plays no role in generation. Galen, on the contrary, and those who follow him assert that generation can only occur when semen from male and female come into contact.

And then, see how the doctors, philosophers and lawyers are all disputing and quarrelling with our women about how long a pregnancy can last! Personally I support, from my own case, those who assert that a pregnancy can last eleven months: the whole world is full of such experiences; any simple, uneducated woman could give advice on these disputed questions. And still we cannot reach agreement!324

That suffices to demonstrate that Man has no more knowledge of his own body than of his own soul. We have shown Man to himself – and his reason to his reason, to see what it has to tell us. I have succeeded in showing, I think, how far reason is from understanding even itself.

[C] And what can anyone understand who cannot understand himself? ‘Quasi vero mensuram ullius rei possit agere, qui sui nesciat’ [As though one could measure anything and not know how to measure oneself].325 Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made Man the measure of all things – Man, who has never known even his own measurements. If Man cannot have it, then his dignity will not let any other creature have it: yet Man is so full of contradictions and his ideas are so constantly undermining each other that so favourable a proposition is simply laughable: it leads to the inevitable conclusion that both measure and the measurer are nothing.326

When Thales reckons that a knowledge of Man is very hard to acquire, he is telling him that knowledge of anything else is impossible.327

For your sake, Patroness,328 I have abandoned my usual practice and have taken some pains to make this into a very long chapter. Sebond is your author: you will, of course, continue to defend him with the usual forms of argument in which you are instructed every day; that will exercise your mind and your scholarship. The ultimate rapier-stroke which I am using here must only be employed as a remedy of last resort. It is a desperate act of dexterity, in which you must surrender your own arms to force your opponent to lose his. It is a covert blow which you should only use rarely and with discretion. It is rashness indeed to undo another by undoing yourself. [B] We must not seek to die as an act of revenge, as Gobrias did when locked in close combat with a Persian nobleman: Darius arrived on the scene, sword in hand, but was afraid to strike for fear of killing him; Gobrias shouted to him to strike boldly, even if he had to run both of them through.329

[C] I have seen the proffered terms of a duel condemned in cases where the weapons or the circumstances left no room for hope that either of the combatants could survive.

The Portuguese took fourteen Turkish prisoners in the Indian Ocean, who, impatient of their captivity, decided to reduce themselves, their masters and the vessel to ashes; they succeeded in doing so by rubbing some of the ship’s nails together until a spark fell among the barrels of gunpowder which were there.330

[A] Here we have now reached the limits and very boundaries of knowledge, where (as in the case of Virtue) extremes become vices. [A1] Keep to the beaten track: it can hardly be good to be so subtle and so clever. Remember the Tuscan proverb, ‘Chi troppo s’assottiglia si scavezza’ [He who becomes too clever is lost]. [A] My advice to you is to cling to moderation and temperance, as much in your opinions and arguments as in your conduct, fleeing what is merely new or odd. All roads which wander from the norm displease me. You, by the authority of your high rank as well as by virtue of qualities which are more strictly your own, can, with a glance, command anyone you please; you ought to have entrusted this task to a professional scholar, who would have been able to make a very different defence of these ideas and to have enriched them more effectively.331 Nevertheless there is ample material here for what you have to do.

When talking of Law, Epicurus said that even the harshest laws were necessary: without them men would start eating each other. [C] Plato is a mere finger’s breadth away from that; he says that, without laws, we would live like wild animals: and he makes a good assay at proving that true.332 [A] Our minds are dangerous tools, rash and prone to go astray: it is hard to reconcile them with order and moderation. We have seen during my lifetime virtually all outstanding men, all men of abnormally lively perception, breaking out into licentiousness of opinion or behaviour. It is a miracle if you find one who is settled and civilized. We are right to erect the strictest possible fences around the human mind. In the march of scholarship or anything else the mind must needs have its footsteps counted and regulated; you must supply artificial hedges and make it hunt only within them. [A1] We rein it in, neck and throat, with religions, laws, customs, precepts, rewards and punishments (both mortal and immortal), and we still find it escaping from all these bonds, with its garrulousness and laxity. It is an empty vessel: we can neither grasp it nor aim it; it is bizarre and misshapen and suffers no knot and no grapple.

[B] Certainly few souls are so powerful, so law-abiding and so well endowed that we can trust them to act on their own, allowing them liberty of judgement to sail responsibly and moderately beyond accepted opinion. It is more expedient to keep them under tutelage. What an outrageous sword [C] the mind is, even for its owner, [A] unless he knows how to arm himself ordinately and with discretion. [C] No beast more rightly needs blinkers to compel it to restrict its gaze to what lies before its feet, and to stop it from wandering about, this way and that, outside the ruts which custom and law have trodden out for it. [A] That is why it would be better for you to keep closely to your usual ways, whatever they may be, rather than to fly off like this with such frantic licence. Nevertheless, if one of those newfangled ‘doctors’ comes into your presence and starts acting clever, putting your spiritual health at risk as well as his own, you can, in the last resort, call on this remedy as a prophylactic against the deadly plague which is daily spreading through your courts: it will stop that poisonous contagion from infecting you and those about you.333

The freedom and vigour of minds in Antiquity created many Schools holding different opinions in philosophy and the humanities; before taking sides, each individual was responsible for judging and choosing for himself. But nowadays [C] men are all in step, ‘qui certis quibusdam destinatisque sententiis addicti et consecrati sunt, ut etiam quae non probant, cogantur defendere’ [bound by vows to certain definite opinions, so that they are forced to defend even those which have not won their assent];334 [A] our studies are accepted according to the decrees of civil authority, [C] with the result that our Schools have only one model, all having the same circumscribed form of basic instruction and teaching; [A] we now no longer try and find out what weight and value such coins have: each of us in his turn accepts them at the going rate with the generally approved value. Nobody defends the alloy, only its currency. Every discipline becomes equally acceptable. Medicine is accepted as though it were as valid as geometry; jiggery-pokery, enchantments, magic spells producing impotence, communication with the spirits of the dead, prognostications, casting horoscopes and even that absurd hunt for the philosopher’s stone, all pass without contradiction. You merely have to know that the seat of Mars lies at the centre of the triangle of the palm, Venus in the thumbs and Mercury in your little finger; or know that, if the line of Fortune cuts across the protuberance of the forefinger, that is a sign of cruelty, but when it stops short at a point below the middle finger and the median line forming an angle with the line-of-life just below it, that is the sign of a pitiful death; in the case of a woman, if the line-of-nature is ‘open’ (not forming an angle with the line-of-life) that portends unchastity. Witness for yourself whether a mastery of this particular science does not win a man favour favour and respect in any company.

Theophrastus said that the human intellect, guided by the senses, could go only so far towards understanding natural causes; but when it reaches the original first causes it proves blunt and has to stop, either because of its own weakness or else because of the difficulty of the subject.335

That is a moderate and modest opinion which holds that our intellect is adequate enough to bring us to the knowledge of some things but that there are definite limits to its power, beyond which it is rash to use it.

It is a plausible opinion, set forth by conciliatory men (but it is difficult to fix boundaries for the human mind: it is avidly curious and sees no more reason for stopping after a mile than after fifty yards); it says: ‘The assays of experience have taught me that where one man fails another succeeds; that what is unknown to one century is clarified by the next; that the sciences and the arts are not just cast in a mould all at once, but have to be gradually shaped by repeated handling and polishing, just as the mother-bear takes time to lick her cub into shape; I may not be strong enough to uncover anything but I can still take soundings and make assays; by kneading and working the dough of this new subject-matter, by blending it and warming it through, I make it easier for my successor to enjoy it at leisure; I render it more pliable for him, more manageable.

ut hymettia soleCera remollescit, tractataque pollice, multas Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu.

[As wax from Mt Hymettos can be softened in the sun and kneaded with the thumb to form various shapes, becoming more useful with usage.]336

A second man will do the same for the third: that is why no difficulty should drive me to despair – nor should my own powerlessness, for it is merely my own; Man is capable of understanding everything as well as something.’

Yes; but if Man admits, like Theophrastus, that he has no knowledge of first causes and principles, then let him boldly give up all the rest of his knowledge; without foundations, his argument collapses; discussion and inquiry have only one aim: to establish first principles; if Man’s course is not stopped by his reaching that goal, he is thrown into boundless uncertainty. [C] ‘Non potest aliud alio magis minusve comprehendi, quoniam omnium rerum una est definitio comprehendedi’ [One thing cannot be better understood, or less understood, than another: ‘understanding’ anything always means the same].337

[A] It is probable that if the soul knew anything, she would first know herself; then, if she knew anything outside herself, she would first of all know her bodily sheath. Yet we can see the gods of the medical schools still quarrelling over human anatomy:

Mulciber in Trojam, pro Troja stabat Apollo. [Vulcan against Troy: Apollo for Troy.]338

Can we ever expect them to agree! We are closer to ourselves than to the whiteness of snow or the weight of a stone: if Man does not know himself, how can he know what his properties and powers are? Some true knowledge may perhaps find lodgings in us; if so, that is by chance, since error is received into the soul in the same way and in the same fashion; souls have no means of telling one from the other, no means of separating truth from falsehood.

The Academic philosophers accepted that our balance of judgement may be swayed one way or the other; they found it too crude to say that it is no more likely that snow be white than black, or that we no more understand the movement of a stone thrown by our own hand than the movement of the Eighth Sphere. These are bizarre difficulties and our intellect can hardly find room for them (even though they had established that we are incapable of knowing anything and that Truth is swallowed up in deep abysses where Man’s vision cannot penetrate); to avoid them they admitted that some things are more likely than others and concede to judgement the power to incline towards one probability rather than another. They grant it this propensity, but they deny it conclusions.

The Pyrrhonists’ idea is bolder, yet, at the same time, more true-seeming.339 For what is this Platonic inclination, this propensity towards one proposition rather than another, than the recognition of there being more apparent truth in this than in that? But if our minds could grasp the form, lineaments, stance and face of Truth, then they would see whole truths as easily as partial truths, nascent and imperfect. Take that apparent verisimilitude which makes the scales incline to the left rather than to the right – then increase it; take that ounce of verisimilitude which turns the scales: multiply it a hundredfold or a thousandfold; in the end the balance will come down definitely on one side, deciding on one choice, on one whole truth.

But how can they bring themselves to yield to verisimilitude if they cannot recognize verity? How can they know there to be a resemblance to something the essence of which they do not know? We judge entirely, or entirely not. If our intellectual faculties and our senses have no foundation to stand on but only float about in the wind, then it is pointless to allow our judgement to be influenced by their operation, no matter what ‘probabilities’ it seems to present us with;340 and so the surest position for our intellect to adopt, and the happiest, would be the one where it could remain still, straight, inflexible, without motion or disturbance. [C] ‘Inter visa vera aut falsa ad animi assensum nihil interest’ [Where the assent of the mind is concerned, there is no difference between true impressions and false ones].341

[A] Things do not lodge in us with their form and their essence; they do not come in by the force of their own authority: we can see that clearly; if they did, we would all react to them in the same way: wine would taste the same in the mouth of a sick man and a healthy one; a man whose hands were calloused or benumbed would find the same hardness in the timber or iron he was handling as anyone else. External objects therefore throw themselves on our mercy; we decide how we accept them.342

Now, if we, for our part, could receive anything without changing it, if our human grasp were firm and capable of seizing hold of truth by our own means, then truth could be passed on from hand to hand, from person to person, since those means are common to all men. Among so many concepts we could find at least one which all would believe with universal assent. But the fact that there is no single proposition which is not subject to debate or controversy among us, or which cannot be so, proves that our natural judgement does not grasp very clearly even what it does grasp, since my judgement cannot bring a fellow-man’s judgement to accept it, which is a sure sign that I did not myself reach it by means of a natural power common to myself and to all men.

Let us leave aside that infinite confusion of opinions which we can see among the philosophers themselves and that endless, world-wide debate about knowledge. It really is the truest of presuppositions that men – I mean the most learned, the best-endowed and the cleverest of men – never agree about anything, not even that the sky is above our heads. Those who doubt everything doubt that too. Those who deny that we can ever know anything say we cannot know whether the sky is above our heads or not. Those two opinions are by far the strongest, numerically.

Apart from this infinite diversity and disagreement, we can easily see that the foundations of our powers of judgement are insecure from the worry it personally causes us and from the lack of certainty each man feels within himself. How our judgements vary! How frequently we change our ideas! What I hold and believe today, I hold and believe with the totality of my belief. All my faculties, all my resources hold tight to that opinion and vouch for it with all their might. It would be impossible for me to embrace and maintain any truth more strongly. I am wholly for it, truly for it. But – not once, not a hundred times, not a thousand times, but every day – have I not embraced something else with the same resources and under the same circumstances, only to be convinced later that it was wrong? At least we should acquire wisdom at our own expense! If this appearance has once deceived me, if my touchstone regularly proves unreliable and my scales wrong and out of true, why should I trust them this time, rather than all the others? Is it not stupid to let oneself be deceived so often by the same guide? Fortune may shift us five hundred times, may treat our powers of belief like a pot to be endlessly emptied and filled with ever-differing opinions: nevertheless, the present one, the last one, is always sure and infallible! For this last one we must abandon goods, honour, life, health, everything.

posterior res illa reperta, Perdit, et immutat sensus ad pristina quaeque.

[When we find something new, the recent destroys the older and makes us change our taste for it.]343

[B] Whatever people preach to us and whatever we may learn from them, never forget that the giver is a man and so is the taker; a mortal hand presents it to us: a mortal hand takes it from him. Only such things as come to us from Heaven have the right and the authority to carry conviction; they alone bear the mark of Truth; but even they cannot be seen with our human eyes, nor do we obtain them by our own means: so great and so holy an Image could never dwell in so wretched a dwelling, unless God first makes it ready for that purpose, unless he forms it anew and fortifies it by his special grace and supernatural favour.

[A] Our condition is subject to error: that ought, at very least, to lead us to be more moderate and restrained in making changes. We ought to admit that, no matter what we allow into our understanding, it often includes falsehoods which enter by means of the same tools which have often proved contradictory and misleading.

It is not surprising that they should prove contradictory, since they are so easily biased and twisted by the lightest of occurrences. It is certain that our conceptions, our judgement and our mental faculties in general are all affected by the changes and alterations of the body. Those alterations are ceaseless. Are our minds not more alert, our memory more ready, our reasoning powers more lively when we are well rather than ill? Does not everything present a different aspect to our minds under the influence of joy and gaiety or of chagrin and melancholy? Do you think that the poems of Catullus or Sappho delight a miserable old miser as they do a vigorous and ardent youth? [B] Cleomenes the son of Anaxandridas being ill, his friends reproached him with having new and unaccustomed humours and ideas. ‘I am not surprised,’ he replied; ‘I am not the same person when I am well: being different, my opinions and ideas are different too.’344

[A] There is a saying current in the legal chicanery of our law-courts applied to a criminal who comes before judges who happen to be in a good, gentle, generous mood: GAUDEAT DE BONA FORTUNA ‘Let him enjoy this good luck’: for it is certain that we sometimes come across minds whose judgement is prickly, sharp and poised to condemn and which, at other times, are less difficult, more affable, more given to finding excuses. A judge may leave home suffering from the gout, jealous, or incensed by a thieving valet: his entire soul is coloured and drunk with anger: we cannot doubt that his judgement is biased towards wrath. [B] The august Senate of the Areopagus held their sessions at night, lest the sight of the plaintiff should influence their justice. [A] The very air and calm weather have power to change us – as that Greek poem says which Cicero cited:

Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse Juppiter auctifera lustravit lampade terras.

[The minds of men are such as Father Jupiter wills them to be, as he bathes the earth in fruitful light.]345

It is not only fevers, potions and great events which upset our judgement: the lightest thing can send it spinning. If a continual fever lays our minds prostrate, you can be sure that a three day fever will have a proportionately bad effect on them, even though we are not aware of it. If apoplexy can dim and totally snuff out our mental vision, you can be sure that even a cold will confuse it. Consequently, there can hardly be found a single hour in an entire lifetime when our powers of judgement are settled in their proper place; our bodies are subject to so many sustained changes and are composed of so many kinds of principles that there is always one pulling the wrong way –I trust the doctors over that!

This malady, moreover, is not so easy to detect unless it is extreme and past all cure; Reason always hobbles, limps and walks askew, in falsehood as in truth, so that it is hard to detect when she is mistaken or unhinged.

By reason I always mean that appearance of rationality which each of us constructs for himself – the kind of reason which can characteristically have a thousand contrary reactions to the same subject and is like a tool of malleable lead or wax: it can be stretched, bent or adapted to any size or to any bias; if you are clever, you can learn to mould it.

Take a judge; however well-intentioned he may be, he must watch himself carefully (and not many people spend much time doing that), otherwise some inclination toward friend, relation, beauty or revenge (or even something far less weighty, such as that chance impulse which leads us to favour one thing rather than another, or which enables us to choose, without any sanction of reason, between two identical objects – or even some more shadowy cause, equally vain) will encourage some sneaking sympathy or hostility toward one of the parties to slip, unnoticed, into his judgement and tip the balance.

I spy closely on myself and keep my eyes constantly directed on myself alone – I do not have much else to do:

quis sub Arcto Rex gelidae metuatur orae, Quid Tyridatem terreat, unice Securus

[Quite indifferent to what ruler of the frozen North inspires great fear, or what dangers frighten Tiridates]346 –

yet even I hardly dare to tell of the vanity and the weakness which I find in myself. I have such wobbly legs, I am so unsteady on my feet, I totter about so and cannot even trust my eyesight, with the result that I feel quite a different person before and after a meal; when good health and a fine sunny day smile at me, I am quite debonair; give me an ingrowing toe-nail, and I am touchy, bad-tempered and unapproachable. [B] My horse’s gait seems sometimes rough, sometimes gentle; the very same road, now short, now much longer, and the same form of action more agreeable or less so. [A] Now, I am ready to do anything; later, ready to do nothing; what is nice now can be nasty later on. [A1] A thousand chance emotions, unbidden, are in turmoil within me; sometimes a melancholic humour gets hold of me; at others, a choleric one; sometimes grief or joy dominate me, for reasons of their own. [A] I pick up some books: I may have discovered outstanding beauties in a particular passage which really struck home: another time I happen upon the same passage and it remains an unknown, shapeless lump for me, however much I twist it, and pat it and bend it or turn it. [B] Even in the case of my own writings I cannot always recover the flavour of my original meaning; I do not know what I wanted to say and burn my fingers making corrections and giving it some new meaning for want of recovering the original one – which was better. I go backwards and forwards: my judgement does not always march straight ahead, but floats and bobs about,

velut minuta magno Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.

[Like a tiny boat buffeted on the ocean by a raging tempest.]347

Many’s the time I have taken an opinion contrary to my own and (as I am fond of doing) tried defending it for the fun of the exercise: then, once my mind has really applied itself to that other side, I get so firmly attached to it that I forget why I held the first opinion and give it up. Almost any inclination, no matter which, takes me with it and carries me along by my own weight. Almost anybody could say much the same of himself if he watched himself [C] as I do. [B] Preachers know that the emotion which comes upon them as they speak moves them towards belief; and we know that when we are in a temper we devote ourselves to defending an assertion, impressing it upon ourselves and embracing it with furious approbation, far more than we ever do in cold-blooded calm.

You give your lawyer a simple statement of your case; he replies, hesitantly, doubtfully: you feel that he is quite indifferent which side he is to defend. But if you offer him a good fee to get stuck into it and all worked up about it, does he not begin to take a real interest and, once his will is inflamed, do not his arguments and forensic skills become inflamed as well? A clear and indubitable truth comes and presents itself to his understanding. He finds that your case sheds quite a new light: he really believes in it and convinces himself accordingly. I even wonder whether ardour, born of despite and of obstinacy, when confronted by pressure from a magistrate or by violent threats – [C] (or even simply a concern for reputation) – [B] has not brought some men to be burned in defence of an opinion for which, when at liberty among friends, they would never even have burned their finger-tips.

[A] The jolts and shocks which our soul receives from the passions of the body greatly affect her, but her own proper passions do so even more. They have such a hold on her that it could perhaps be maintained that her motions and propulsion come from her own tempests: without those agitations she would be becalmed like a ship on the open sea, abandoned by the helpful winds.348 Anyone who did maintain that, [C] following the Peripatetics, [A] would do us little wrong, since it is recognized that most of the finer actions of the soul require – and can only arise from – such passionate impulses. It is said that valour cannot be achieved without the help of anger –

[C] Semper Ajax fortis, fortissimus tamen in furore [Ajax was always brave, but bravest when mad with fury]349 –

that we do not attack the wicked or our foes vigorously enough, unless we are angry; and that, to get justice out of judges, counsel must move them to anger. Strong desires motivated Themistocles; they motivated Demosthenes and forced philosophers to travel far and work late: and they lead us too towards useful ends: honour, learning, health.

In addition, our soul’s weakness when faced with pain and suffering serves to nurture repentance and remorse within our conscience and to feel the chastisements with which God scourges us as well as the chastisements of political punishment. [A] Compassion acts as a stimulus to [B] clemency; prudent self-preservation350 [C] and self-control [B] are awakened by our fear; and how many fair actions are awakened by ambition? And how many by arrogance? [A] In short, not one eminent or dashing virtue can exist without some strong, unruly emotion. Was this one of the considerations which moved the Epicureans to relieve God of all care and concern for the affairs of men, since even the very actions of his goodness could not be directed towards us without disturbing his repose with passions – which are the goads and the incitements which drive the soul towards virtuous actions? [C] Or else did they think differently, taking the passions to be like storms, shamefully deflowering the soul of her tranquillity? ‘Ut maris tranquillitas intelligitur, nulla ne minima quidem aura fluctus commovente: sic animi quietus et placatus status cernitur, quum perturbatio nulla est qua moveri queat’ [We know the sea is tranquil when not even the slightest breath of wind ruffles the surface; so too the soul is calm and at peace when there is no emotion seeking to disturb it].351

[A] What varied thoughts and reasons, what conflicting notions, are presented to us by our varied passions! What certainty can we find in something so changeable and unstable as the soul, subject by her condition to the dominance of perturbations, [C] and who never moves except under external constraint. [A] If our judgement is in the hands of illness itself and of turbulence; if it is obliged to receive its impressions from foolhardiness and madness: what certainty can we expect from it?

[C] Is it not somewhat bold of Philosophy to think that men perform their greatest deeds, those nearest to the divine, when they are beside themselves, frenzied and out of their senses? Our amendment comes when our reason slumbers or when we are deprived of it; the two natural ways of entering into the council chamber of the gods and to have foreknowledge of Destiny are sleep and frenzy.352

Here is a pleasant thought: when the passions bring dislocation to our reason, we become virtuous; when reason is driven out by frenzy or by sleep, that image of death, we become prophets and seers. I have never been more inclined to believe Philosophy! It was a pure enthusiasm – breathed into the spirit of Philosophy by holy Truth herself – which wrenched from her, against her normal teaching, that the tranquil state of our soul, the quiet state, the sanest state that Philosophy can obtain for her, is not her best state. Our waking sleeps more than our sleeping; our wisdom is less wise than our folly; our dreams are worth more than our discourse; and to remain inside ourselves is to adopt the worst place of all.

But does Philosophy not realize that we are clever enough to notice that that maxim which makes the spirit so great, so perfect, and so clear-sighted when detached from Man, and yet so dark, so ignorant and so earthy when it remains in Man, is produced by the very spirit which itself forms part of dark, ignorant and earthy Man. And so, for that very cause, is neither to be trusted nor believed?353

[A] Being of a soft and heavy complexion, I do not have much experience of those disturbances which bear the mind away and which mostly take our souls by surprise without giving them time to know themselves. But there is a passion in the heart of the young (induced, they say, by idleness); those who have assayed resisting its power, even when it takes an untrammelled, moderate course, find that it gives a good idea of the abrupt changes and deteriorations which our judgement can suffer. There was a time when I tensed myself to resist and parry its assaults (for I am so far from being one who welcomes vices, that I never give in to them unless they compel me to); despite my resistance, I would feel it within me as it was born, and as it grew and developed; I was lively: my eyes were open. Yet it would seize me, possess me. It was like a kind of drunkenness; everything took on an unaccustomed appearance; I would see the woman I yearned for becoming manifestly more attractive, her qualities swelling and growing as the wind of my imagination blew upon them; the difficulties facing my courtship would seem to become easy and smooth; my reason and conscience would withdraw into the background. Then, with lightning speed, at the very instant when my fire had burned itself out, my soul would recover another state, another judgement, another way of looking at things; it was now the difficulties of getting out of it which seemed immense and insurmountable; the very same things took on very different tastes and appearances from the ones offered me by inflamed desire.

Which was right? Pyrrho knows nothing about that!

We are never free from illness: fevers blow hot and cold; we drop straight from symptoms of a burning passion into symptoms of a shivery one. [B] The more I jumped forward, the more I now leap back:

Qualis ubi alterno procurrens gurgite pontus Nunc ruit ad terras, scopulisque superjacit undam, Spumeus, extremamque sinu perfundit arenam; Nunc rapidus retro atque aestu revoluta resorbens Saxa fugit, littusque vado labente relinquit.

[Thus does the sea with alternate tides now dash up the beach, covering the rocks with its foaming billows, and seeking out the deep recesses of the sand; and then it quickly turns, sucking back the shingle and fleeing the rocks, as its sinking waters relinquish the beach.]354

[A] This very awareness of my mutability has had the secondary effect of engendering a certain constancy in my opinions. I have hardly changed any of my first and natural ones, since whatever likelihood novelty may appear to have, I do not change easily, for fear of losing in the exchange. As I do not have the capacity for making a choice myself, I accept Another’s choice and remain where God put me. Otherwise I would not know how to save myself from endlessly rolling.

[AI] And thus, by God’s grace, without worry or a troubled conscience, I have kept myself whole, within the ancient beliefs of our religion, through all the sects and schisms that our century has produced. [A] The writings of the Ancients – I mean the good, ample, solid ones – tempt me and stir me almost at will; the one I am reading always seems the most firm. All appear right in their turn, even though they do contradict each other. The ease with which good minds can make anything they wish seem likely, so that there is nothing so strange but that they will set about lending it enough colour to take in a simple man like me, shows how weak their proofs really are. For three thousand years the skies and the stars were all in motion; everyone believed it; then [C] Cleanthes of Samos or, according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of Syracuse [A] decided to maintain that it was the Earth which did the moving,355 [C] revolving on its axis through the oblique circle of the Zodiac; [A] and in our own time Copernicus has given such a good basis to this doctrine that he can legitimately draw all the right astronomical inferences from it. What lesson are we to learn from that, except not to worry about which of the two opinions may be true? For all we know, in a thousand years’ time another opinion will overthrow them both.356

Sic volvenda aetas conmmutat tempora rerum: Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore; Porro aliud succedit, et e contemptibus exit, Inque dies magis appetitur, floretque repertum Laudibus, et miro est mortales inter honore.

[Thus the rolling years give various things their time; what used to be highly esteemed is now worthless; something else comes out from discredit and succeeds the old; it is daily sought for; everyone praises it and it is wondrously honoured among mortal men.]357

Thus, whenever some new doctrine is offered to us we have good cause for distrusting it and for reflecting that the contrary was in fashion before that was produced; it was overturned by this later one, but some third discovery may overturn that too, one day. Before the principles which Aristotle introduced came into repute, other principles satisfied human reason just as his satisfy us now. What letters-patent do Aristotle’s principles have, what exclusive privilege, that the course of our inquiries should stop with them and that they have the right to our assent for all time? They are not exempt: they can be kicked out as their predecessors were. When some new argument presses me hard, it is up to me to decide whether someone else may find a satisfactory reply even if I cannot; for to believe everything that may look true just because we ourselves cannot refute it, is very simple-minded. From that it would follow that the belief of the common people – [C] and all of us are common people – [A] would blow about like a weathercock: for their minds, soft and non-resistant, would constantly be forced to accept different impressions, each one effacing the trace of the other. Anyone who feels too weak to resist should follow legal practice and reply that he will consult counsel – or refer to the wiser heads who trained him.

How long has medicine been in the world? They say that some newcomer called Paracelsus is changing or reversing the entire order of the old rules, maintaining that, up to the present, medicine has merely served to kill people. He will be able to prove that easily enough, I believe, but it would not be very wise for me, I think, to test his new empiricism at the risk of my life. [AI] ‘Believe nobody,’ as the saying goes. ‘Anyone can say anything.’358

One of those men who champion novelties and reformations in natural science told me recently that all the Ancients had evidently been wrong about the nature and movements of the winds; if I would only listen he would make me clearly see the palpable truth. After showing some patience in hearing his arguments (which looked extremely probable) I said, ‘What! Those who were navigating according to the rules of Theophrastus, were they really going West when steering East? Were they sailing sideways or astern?’ – ‘That is as may be,’ he replied, ‘but they certainly got it wrong.’ I then retorted that I would rather be guided by results than by reason – for they are always clashing! I have even been told that in geometry (which claims to have reached the highest degree of certainty among the sciences) there are irrefutable demonstrations which overturn truth based on experience. Jacques Peletier, for example, in my own home, told me how he had discovered two lines drawing ever closer together but which, as he could prove, would meet only in infinity.359 And the sole use Pyrrhonists have for their arguments and their reason is to undermine whatever experience shows to be probable; it is wonderful how far our supple reason will go along with their project of denying factual evidence: they can prove that we do not move, that we do not speak and that there is no such thing as weight or heat, with the same force of argument as we have when we prove the most likely things to be true.

Ptolemy was a great figure; he established the boundaries of the known world; all the ancient philosophers thought they had the measure of it, save for a few remote islands which might have escaped their knowledge. A thousand years ago, if you had questioned the data of cosmography, you would have been accused of Pyrrhonizing – of doubting opinions accepted by everybody; [B] it used to be heresy to allow the existence of the Antipodes!360 [A] But now that in our century new discoveries have revealed, not the odd island or the odd individual country, but an infinite land-mass, almost equal in size to the part we already knew, geographers today proceed to assure us that everything has really been seen and discovered this time.

Nam quod adest praesto, placet, et pollere videtur. [For we are pleased with what is to hand; it works its spell.]361

Since Ptolemy was once mistaken over his basic tenets, would it not be foolish to trust what moderns are saying now?362 [C] Is it not more likely that this huge body which we call the Universe is very different from what we think? Plato holds that its entire aspect changes – that there comes a point when the heavens, the stars and the sun reverse the motions which we can see there and actually rotate from East to West.363 The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that since the time of their first king, some eleven thousand years ago – (and they showed him the statues of all these kings, portrayed from life) – the Sun had changed its course four times, and the sea and land had changed places. They also said that no date within time can be ascribed to the origin of the world;364 Aristotle and Cicero agree with that; and one of our own people maintained that the world exists from all eternity but has a cycle of deaths and rebirths; he cited Solomon and Isaiah as witnesses, his aim being to counter objections to God’s having been a Creator who had once never created anything, an idle God who only cast aside his idleness when he set his hand to this enterprise and therefore a God subject to change.365

In the most famous of the Greek Schools of Philosophy the Universe is considered to be a god made by a greater one; it is composed of a body, with a soul situated in the centre but extending to the circumference by means of musical Numbers; it is divine, most blessed, most great, most wise and eternal. Within this ‘god’ there are other gods (the earth, the sea, the heavenly bodies) all maintained by the harmonious and perpetual movement of a sacred dance as they draw together then draw apart, hide then reveal themselves, or move to and fro and change their rows.366

Heraclitus laid down that the Universe was composed of fire and was destined one day to burst into flames and burn itself out: it would be born again some other time. Apuleius said that Men were ‘sigillatim mortales, cunctim perpetui’ [individually mortal, collectively eternal]. Alexander gave his mother the written record which one of the Egyptian priests had taken from their monuments; it bore witness to the boundless antiquity of that people and included a true account of the birth and growth of other countries. Cicero and Diodorus say that, in their own days, the Chaldaeans kept records going back some four hundred thousand years; Aristotle, Pliny and others date Zoroaster six thousand years before the time of Plato.

Plato says that the citizens of Sais possess written records covering eight thousand years, adding that the city of Athens was built a thousand years before the foundation of that city.367

[B] Epicurus taught that there exist in several other worlds objects very like the ones we can see here, fashioned the same way.368 He would have said that with even greater assurance if he could have seen those strange examples of past and present similarities and resemblances to be found between our world and that New World of the West Indies.

[C] In truth, when I consider what we know about the course of social life on this earth, I have often been struck with wonder at the resemblances there are – separated by immense spaces of place and time – between many savage beliefs or fantastic popular opinions which, whatever way you look at them, do not seem to arise from our natural reasoning. The human mind is a great forger of miracles, we know that: but this relationship has something abnormal about it which I cannot define; you can even see it in names, events and thousands of other ways. [B] For we have newly discovered peoples who, as far as we know, have never heard of us, yet where they believe in circumcision; where countries or great states are entirely governed by women, without men; where you can find something like our Lenten fasts, with the addition of sexual abstinence. We have found peoples where our crosses are honoured in various ways (in one place they even displayed them prominently on their graves); in another crosses were used (especially the cross of St Andrew) to ward off nocturnal visions; they also put them on their children’s beds against enchantments. Elsewhere was discovered a wooden cross, immensely tall, which was worshipped as the god of rain – and that was very far from the coast. Also found there were the express image of our penitents, the use of mitres, the practice of priestly celibacy, the art of divination from the entrails of sacrificed animals, [C] a total abstention from all kinds of fish and flesh, [B] the custom for priests to make liturgical use of a special tongue not the common one; the idea that the first god was driven away by a second, his younger brother; the belief that they were created with all kinds of advantages which were subsequently cut off because of their sin; their land changed and their natural condition made harsher; they were submerged by a heavensent flood, only a few families being saved who had taken refuge in high mountain caves, which they blocked up to stop the waters getting in; various species of animals were shut in there too; when they thought the rain had ceased, dogs were sent out: they came back dripping wet and clean, so it was judged that the waters had only begun to subside; later other dogs were sent out. When they returned all covered in mud the humans emerged to re-people the world, which they found to be full of nothing but snakes.

In one case the inhabitants were convinced of a Day of Judgement. When the Spaniards scattered the bones of their dead about as they plundered their graves in search of treasure, they were beside themselves with anger, declaring that such scattered bones could not easily be put together again. They have trade by barter (but no other) with fairs and markets for this purpose; they have dwarves and deformed people to enliven the banquets of their princes; falconry they have, but with their own native birds; they have tyrannous taxation, elegant gardens, acrobats, dancing, musical instruments, coats-of-arms, tennis-courts, games of dice and chance – at which they get so carried away that they stake themselves and their freedom; they have medicine based entirely on magic charms, pictorial writing, a belief in one first man who was father of all peoples; they have the worship of a god who once lived as a Man in perfect celibacy, abstinence and penitence, preaching the law of Nature and liturgical ceremonies and who disappeared from the world without a natural death; a belief in giants, the custom of getting drunk on their local drink and seeing who can down the most, religious ornaments painted with bones and death’s heads, surplices, holy water and aspergilla, women and servants who gaily volunteer to be burnt or buried alive with their husband or masters, laws of inheritance which leave everything to the eldest son and set nothing but obedience aside for the younger one, the custom that a man promoted to high rank adopts a new name and abandons his old one, the custom of sprinkling chalk on the knee of a newborn babe, saying to him: ‘Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return’; and they have the art of augury.

Such vain shadows of our religion as may be seen in some of these examples witness to its dignity and holiness: it has penetrated into infidel nations on our side of the world by a kind of imitation, but to those natives of far-off lands it came by a shared supernatural inspiration. For we found a belief in Purgatory but of a difference style: they attribute to cold what we attribute to heat, thinking that the souls of the dead are punished and purged by the rigours of extreme cold.

That reminds me of another pleasing example of diversity: some peoples like to uncover the end of the penis, circumcizing the foreskin like Jews or Moslems, whereas others have such conscientious objections to ever uncovering it that, lest the top of it should ever see the light of day, they scrupulously stretch the foreskin right over it and tie it together with little cords.

And here is another one: just as we honour kings and festive days by putting on our best clothes, there are regions where they emphasize the disparity between themselves and their king and mark their total submission to him by appearing in their shabbiest clothing; as they go into the palace they put a tattered robe over their good one, so that all pomp and glory should belong to the king alone.369

But to get on.

[AI] If Nature includes among her normal activities – along with everything else – the beliefs, judgements and opinions of men; and if such things have their cycles, seasons, births and deaths, every bit as much as cabbages do, the heavens changing them and influencing them at will: what permanent, magisterial authority should we go on attributing to them?370

[B] Now if experience makes it clear that the very form of our being – not only our colour, build, complexion and behaviour but our mental faculties as well – depends upon our native air, climate and soil ([C] as Vegetius said: ‘et plaga coeli non solum ad robur corporum, sed etiam animorum facit’ [the heavenly regions contribute not only to the strength of men’s bodies but of their souls as well]);371 and if the goddess who founded Athens chose for her city a country of temperate climate which made men wise – that is what the priests of Egypt told Solon: ‘Athenis tenue coelum, ex quo etiam acutiores putantur Attici; crassum Thebis, itaque pingues Thebani et valentes’ [the air of Athens is not oppressive, which is why the Athenians are considered most intelligent; that of Thebes is oppressive, therefore the Thebans are considered heavy and tough]372 – [B] then men must vary as flora and fauna do: whether they are more warlike, just, equable, clever or dull, depends on where they were born. Here they are addicted to wine: there, to robbery and lechery; here they are inclined towards superstition: there to disbelief; [C] here, to freedom: there, to slavery; [B] they may be more suited to learn one particular art of science than another; they may be slow or intelligent, obedient or rebellious, good or bad, all depending on inclinations arising from their physical environment. Change their location, and, like trees, they take on a new character. That was why Cyrus refused to allow the Persians to give up their squat and rugged land and emigrate to softer plains; [C] he said that rich soft lands make for soft men, that fertile lands make for barren minds.373 [B] Now, if we can see that the influence of the stars makes an art or an opinion to flourish; and if a particular age produces a particular kind of nature and inclines the human race towards some particular trait of character (their spirits producing good crops then lean crops, as fields do): what happens to all those special privileges which we pride ourselves upon? A wise man can be mistaken; a hundred men can; indeed, according to us, the whole human race has gone wrong for centuries at a time over this or that: so how can we be sure that human nature ever stops getting things wrong, [C] and that she is not wrong now, in our own period?

[A] Among other considerations witnessing to Man’s weakness, it seems to me that we should not overlook that even his desires cannot lead him to discover what he needs; I am not talking about fruition, but about thinking and wishing: we cannot even agree on what we need to make us contented. Even if we let our thoughts tailor everything to their wishes, they cannot even desire what is proper to them [C] and so be satisfied:

[B] quid enim ratione timemus Aut cupimus? quid tam dextro pede concipis, ut te Conatus non poeniteat votique peracti?

[Is it reason that governs our fears and our desires? What have you ever conceived, even auspiciously, without being sorry about the outcome – even of its success?]374

[A] That is why [C] Socrates prayed the gods to give him only what they knew to be good for him. The Spartans, in public as in private, simply prayed that good and beauteous gifts be vouchsafed to them; they left the choice and selection to the gods:375

[B] Conjugium petimus partumque uxoris; at illi Notum qui pueri qualisque futura sit uxor.

[We pray to have a wife and children, yet only Jupiter knows what the children and that wife will be like.]376

[A] In his supplications the Christian says, ‘Thy will be done’, in order not to suffer that unseemly state which poets feign for King Midas: he prayed to God that all he touched should turn to gold. His prayer was granted: his wine was gold, his bread was gold, so were the very feathers in his bed, his undershirt and all his garments. In this way he found that the enjoyment of his desires crushed him and that he had been granted a boon no man could bear. He had to unpray his prayers:

Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,Effugere optat opes, et quae modo voverat, odit.

[Thunderstruck by so new an evil, rich and wretched both at once, he hates what once he prayed for.]377

[B] I can cite my own case. When I was young I begged Fortune, as much as anything, for the Order of St Michael: it was then the highest mark of honour for the French nobility, and very rare. Fortune granted it to me, but with a smirk instead of elevating me, instead of lifting me up so that I could reach it, she used greater condescension: she debased the Order, and brought it right down to my neck – lower still in fact.

[C] Cleobis and Bito asked their god, Trophonius and Agamedes their goddess, for rewards worthy of their piety; the gift they were given was death: so different from ours, where our needs are concerned, are the opinions of heaven.378

[A] It is sometimes to our detriment that God vouchsafes us riches, honour, life and health itself: the things which please us are not always good for us. If, instead of a cure, he sends us death or a worsening of our ills – ‘Virga tua et baculus tuus ipsa me consolata sunt’ [Even thy rod and thy staff do comfort me] – God acts thus by reason of his Providence, which knows our deserts far more accurately than we can ever do; whatever comes from a hand most loving and omniscient we must accept as good:

si consilium visPermittes ipsis expendere numinibus, quid Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris: Charior est illis homo quam sibi.

[If you want my advice, allow the gods to judge what is best for us and most advantageous for our affairs; a man is dearer to them than he is to himself.]379

For to ask the gods for honour and high office is like begging them to send you into battle, into a game of dice or into some other situation where the outcome is unknown and the gain dubious.380

[A] No quarrel among philosophers is more violent or so bitter as the one which looms over the question of Man’s sovereign good; [C] according to Varro’s calculation, 288 sects were produced by it:381 ‘Qui autem de summo bono dissentit, de tota philosophiae ratione dissentit’ [Whoever disagrees over the sovereign good disagrees about the whole of philosophy].382

[A] Tres mihi convivae prope dissentire videntur, Poscentes vario multum diversa palato: Quid dem? quid non dem? Renuis tu quod jubet alter; Quod petis, id sane est invisum acidumque duobus.

[For me it resembles three men disagreeing at a feast, each liking very different dishes and asking for them. What am I to give them? What am I not to give them? You reject what delights another: what you like is tart and unpleasant to the other two.]383

That is the way Nature ought to answer their disputes and their quarrels.

There are those who say that our good is to be found in virtue; some who say in pleasure; some, in conforming to Nature; one says in knowledge [C] or freedom from pain;384 [A] another, in not letting oneself be deceived by appearances, a notion rather like that other one [B] taught by Pythagoras of old:

[A] Nil admirari prope res est una, Numaci, Solaque quae possit facere et servare beatum;

[Be astonished by nothing; it is almost the one and only way, Numacius, which leads to lasting happiness;]385

that is the aim of the Pyrrhonists. [C] (To be astonished by nothing is, for Aristotle, the attribute of greatness of soul.)386 [A] Archesilaus said that suspending the judgement and keeping it upright and inflexible are good actions, whereas acts of consent and commitment are vicious and bad. It is true that he left his Pyrrhonism behind when he erected that axiom into a certainty!387 Pyrrhonists say that the sovereign good is Ataraxia, which consists in a total immobility of judgement; they consider that not to be a positive affirmation but simply an inner persuasion such as makes them avoid precipices and protect themselves from the chill of the evening; it presents them with this notion and makes them reject any other.

[B] How I wish that, during my lifetime, someone like Justus Lipsius (the most learned man left, a polished and judicious mind, a veritable brother to my dear Turnebus), had the health, the will and sufficient leisure to compile an honest and careful account which listed by class and by category everything we can find out about the opinions of Ancient philosophy on the subject of our being and our morals; it would include their controversies and their reputations, it would tell us who belonged to which school, and how far the founders and their followers actually applied their precepts on memorable occasions which could serve as examples. What a beautiful and useful book that would be!388

[A] Moreover, if we draw our moral rules from ourselves, what confusion we cast ourselves into! For the most convincing advice we get from reason is that each and every man should obey the laws of his own country;389 [C] that is Socrates’ precept, inspired (he said) by divine counsel.390 [A] But what does that mean, except that our rules of conduct are based on chance? Truth must present the same face everywhere. If Man could know solid Rectitude and Justice in their true Essences, he would never restrict them to the customary circumstances of this place or of that; Virtue would not be fashioned from whatever notions happen to be current in Persia or in India.

Nothing keeps changing so continuously as the Law. Since I was born I have seen our neighbours, the English, chopping and changing theirs three or four times, not only on political matters (where we may wish to do without constancy) but on the most important subject there ever can be: religion.391 It makes me feel sad and ashamed, since the English are a people with whom we used to be so familiarly acquainted in my part of the world that traces of their former kinship can still be seen in my own house.

[C] And closer to home, I have seen capital offences made lawful; such are the uncertainties and the fortunes of war that any one of us may eventually be found guilty of lèse-majesté against God and the King, simply for holding fast to different ideas of legitimacy, once our Justice were to fall to the mercy of Injustice (which, after a few years of possession, would change its essence).392 Could that ancient god have more clearly emphasized the place of ignorance within our human knowledge of the divine Being, or taught us that religion is really no more than a human invention, useful for binding societies together, than by telling those who came before his Tripod to beg for instruction that the true way of worship is the one hallowed by custom in each locality?393

Oh God, how bound we are to the loving-kindness of our sovereign Creator for making our belief grow up out of the stupidities of such arbitrary and wandering devotions, establishing it on the changeless foundation of his holy Word!394

[A] But what has Philosophy to teach us in this plight? Why, that we should follow the laws of our country! – laws which are but an uncertain sea of opinions deriving from peoples or princes, who will paint it in as many different colours and present it, reformed, under as many different faces as they have changes of heart. I cannot make my judgement as flexible as that. What kind of Good can it be, which was honoured yesterday but not today [C] and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! What kind of truth can be limited by a range of mountains, becoming a lie for the world on the other side!395

[A] Philosophers can hardly be serious when they try to introduce certainty into Law by asserting that there are so-called Natural Laws, perpetual and immutable, whose essential characteristic consists in their being imprinted upon the human race. There are said to be three such laws; or four; some say less, some say more: a sign that the mark they bear is as dubious as all the rest. How unlucky they are – (for what else should I call it but bad luck, seeing that out of laws so infinite in number, they cannot find even one which luck [C] or accidental chance [A] has allowed to be universally accepted by the agreement of all peoples). They are so pitiful that there is not one of these three – or four – selected laws, which has not been denied and disowned by several nations, not just one. Yet universal approval is the only convincing indication they can cite in favour of there being any Natural Laws at all. For whatever Nature truly ordained, we would, without any doubt, all perform, by common consent: not only all nations but all human beings individually would be deeply aware of force or compulsion when anyone tried to make them violate it. Let them show me just one law with such characteristics: a would like to see it.396

Protagoras and Ariston said that the essential justice of any law consists in the will of the lawgiver: without it, good and honourable lose their qualities, simply lingering on as empty words for things indifferent.

In Plato, Thrasymachus thinks that there is no right other than the advantage of the superior.397

Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom. What is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else – as clever theft was in Sparta. Marriages between close relations are capital offences with us: elsewhere they are much honoured:

gentes esse ferunturIn quibus et nato genitrix, et nata parenti Fungitur, et pietas geminato crescit amore.

[They say there are peoples where the son lies with his mother, the daughter with her father, where family piety is enhanced by a double affection.]398

Murdering children, murdering fathers, holding wives in common, making a business out of robbery, giving free rein to lusts of all sorts – in short there is nothing so extreme that it has not been admitted by the custom of some nation or other.

[B] It is quite believable that natural laws exist: we can see that in other creatures. But we have lost them; that fine human reason of ours is always interfering, seeking dominance and mastery, distorting and confounding the face of everything according to its own vanity and inconsistency. [C] ‘Nihil itaque amplius nostrum est: quod nostrum dico, artis est’ [Nothing of ours is left: what I call ours is really artificial].399

[A] Any object can be seen in various lights and from various points of view: it is chiefly that which gives birth to variety of opinion: one nation sees one facet, and stops there; another sees another.

Nothing can be imagined more horrible than eating one’s father: yet the peoples who followed this custom in the Ancient world looked on it as a mark of piety and love, seeking to provide their ancestors with the most worthy and honourable of obsequies, finding a home for their father’s remains in their own person, in the very marrow of their bones; they were giving them a kind of new life; they were born again, as it were, by being transmuted into their living flesh as their children ate and digested them. It is easy to think what abominable cruelty it would be for men deeply imbued in such a superstition to leave their parents’ remains to rot in the earth, food for beasts and worms.400

The aspects of theft which struck Lycurgus were the quickness, the industry, the boldness and the skill necessary to steal something from a neighbour, as well as of the public good which came from each man carefully guarding his own property. He believed that this gave a grounding in the twin subjects of assault and defence, both of which are useful for training soldiers (the principal virtue and science which he wished to instil into that nation). That outweighed the disorder and injustice of carrying off other people’s property.

The tyrant Dionysius offered Plato a long, perfumed, damask robe, fashionable in Persia. Plato refused it saying that, since he was born a man, he would not willingly wear women’s clothing. Aristippus, however, accepted it, replying that no apparel could corrupt a chaste heart;401 and [C] when his friends taunted him with cowardice for taking so little offence when Dionysius spat in his face, he replied: ‘Merely to catch a gudgeon fishermen suffer the waves to bespatter them from head to foot.’ Diogenes was washing some cabbage leaves when he saw Aristippus go by: ‘If you knew how to live on cabbage,’ Diogenes said, ‘you would not be courting a tyrant.’ Aristippus retorted: ‘You would not be here washing cabbages, if you knew how to live among men.’402

[A] That is how Reason can make different actions seem right. [B] Reason is a two-handled pot: you can grab it from the right or the left.

bellum, O terra hospita, portas; Bello armantur equi, bellum haec armenta minantur. Sed tamen iidem olim curru succedere sueti Quadrupedes, et frena jugo concordia ferre; Spes est pacis.

[You are threatening war; what a hospitable land! Horses are armed for war: war is what these beasts portend! – Yet those same animals are often yoked to carts, plodding tranquilly in harness; there is hope for peace.]403

[C] When they lectured Solon for shedding vain and useless tears at the death of his son, he replied, ‘It is precisely because they are vain and useless that I am right to shed them.’ Socrates’ wife exclaimed, increasing her grief: ‘Those wretched judges have condemned him to death unjustly!’ But Socrates replied, ‘Would you really prefer that I were justly condemned?’404

[A] We pierce our ears: the Greeks held that to be a mark of slavery. When we lie with our wives we hide away: the Indians lie with them in public. The Scythians used their temples to execute foreigners: elsewhere temples serve as sanctuaries:405

[B] Inde furor vulgi, quod numina vicinorum Odit quisque locus, cum solos credat habendos Esse Deos quos ipse colit.

[The fury of the mob is aroused since everyone hates his neighbours’ gods, convinced that the gods he adores are the only true ones.]406

[A] I have heard tell of a judge who, whenever he came across in his lawbooks a thorny disagreement between Bartolus and Baldus or a subject marked by conflicting interpretations, wrote in the margin, Question for friend, meaning by that that the truth was so entangled in controversy that in a similar case he could favour whichever party he wanted to. It was only lack of wit and intellect which stopped him from writing Question for friend all over the place! Counsel and judges today find enough bias in their lawsuits to bowl them any way they please. A field of study so limitless, dependent on the authority of so many opinions and subject to such arbitrariness, is bound to give rise to an extreme confusion of judgements. There is no case so clear that it does not provoke controversy. One court judges this way: another reverses the verdict and then, on a later occasion, reverses its own judgement. Familiar examples of this can be seen in an astonishing abuse which stains the splendour and ceremonial authority of our judicial system: the verdict of the parties is not to settle for the verdict of the Court: they dash from one judge to another for a decision on the same case.

As for the licence of philosophical opinion about vice and virtue, there is no need to go lengthily into that; it is better to pass over some of the notions in silence than to trumpet them abroad [C] before weaker intellects. [B] Arcesilaus said that in lechery proclivities [C] and occasions [B] were irrelevant.’407 ‘Et obscoenas voluptates… si natura requirit, non genere, aut loco, aut ordine, sed forma, aetate, figura metiendas Epicurus putat’ [Epicurus thinks that when Nature demands to be satisfied by lascivious pleasures, we need not consider family origin, position or rank but only beauty, youth and figure]. ‘Ne amores quidem sanctos a sapiente alienos esse arbitrantur” [They even think that forbidden affaires are not incompatible with being a Sage]. ‘Quaeramus ad quam usque aetatem juvenes amandi sint’ [Let us investigate up to what age it is proper to love young men]. The last two quotations are Stoic; together with the reproach which Dicaearchus made to Plato himself on this subject, they show how far even the sanest philosophy will go in tolerating quite excessive licence, far from common practice.408

[A] Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength. But just look at those Ancient concerns which gave the original impulse to that mighty stream, famed, full of dignity, awesome and venerable: you then see them to be so light and so delicate that it is not surprising that these people here – philosophers who weigh everything and reduce everything to reason, never accepting anything on authority and trust – reach verdicts far removed from those of the generality. These people, who model themselves on their concept of Nature as she originally was, not surprisingly stray from the common path in most of their opinions. Few of them for example would have approved of the constraints we impose on marriage; [C] most of them wanted a community of wives without binding obligations. [A] Courteous conventions like ours they rejected.409 Chrysippus said that, for a dozen olives, a philosopher will turn a dozen somersaults in public, even with his breeches off.410 [C] He could hardly have advised Clisthenes against giving his fair daughter Agarista to Hippoclides, just because he saw him stand on his head on a table with his legs wide apart in the air.411

In the midst of a discussion, and in the presence of his followers, Metrocles rather injudiciously let off a fart. To hide his embarrassment he stayed at home until, eventually, Crates came to pay him a visit; to his consolations and arguments Crates added the example of his own licence: he began a farting match with him, thereby removing his scruples and, into the bargain, converting him to the freer Stoic school from the more socially oriented Peripatetics whom he had formerly followed.412 What we call ‘honourable’ behaviour – not to dare to perform openly actions which are ‘honourable’ when done in private – they termed silliness. As for ingeniously concealing or disowning those of our actions which Nature, custom and our very desires publish and proclaim abroad, they reckoned that to be a vice. They thought it a desacralizing of Venus’ mysteries to take them out from the discreet sanctuary of her temple and exhibit them to the public gaze: draw back the curtains, and her sports are debased. (Shame has a kind of weight: concealment, dissimulation and constraint form part of our esteem.) They thought that it was most ingenious that Lust, out of regret for the dignity and convenience of her traditional bedchambers, should don the mask of Virtue, seeking to avoid being prostituted at the crossroads and trampled underfoot before the eyes of the mob. That is why [A] some say that abolishing the public brothels would not merely take the fornication at present restricted to such places and spread it everywhere, but would also stimulate that vice in men by making it more difficult:

Moechus es Aufidiae, qui vir, Corvine, fuisti; Rivalis fuerat qui tuus, ille vir est. Cur aliena placet tibi, quae tua non placet uxor?Nunquid securus non potes arrigere?

[Corvinus! You used to be the husband of Aufidia; she has married your rival and you are her lover. Now she has become the wife of another, she pleases you (she never did when she was your own). Why? Are you unable to get it up without risking a beating?]413

You can find a thousand variations on that experience.

Nullus in urbe fuit tota qui tangere vellet Uxorem gratis, Caeciliane, tuam, Dum licuit; sed nunc, positis custodibus, ingens Turba fututorum est. Ingeniosus homo es.

[Caecilianus: when you left your wife free, nobody in the whole of Rome wanted to touch her: now you have put guards round her, she is besieged by a huge crowd of fucking admirers. Clever chap!]414

Once a philosopher was surprised in the very act; asked what he was doing, he coldly replied: ‘I am planting a man’; he no more blushed than if he had been caught planting garlic.415

[C] It is, I think, too tender and respectful an opinion when one of our great religious authors holds that Necessity actually compels this act to be carried out in modest seclusion: he could not convince himself that the Cynics actually consummated it in their licentious embraces, but were content with imitating lascivious motions in order to display that absence of shame which formed part of their teachings. He thought that they had to find a secluded place later on, so as to be able to ejaculate what shame had constrained them to hold back. But he had insufficiently plumbed the depths of the Cynics’ debauchery: for when Diogenes was masturbating in the presence of crowds of bystanders, he specifically said he wanted to give his belly complete satisfaction by rubbing it up like this. To those who asked why his ‘hunger’ had to be satisfied in the street, not in some more suitable place, he replied, ‘I was in the street when I felt hungry.’ Women philosophers who joined this school joined in with their bodies –everywhere and indiscriminately: Hipparchia was only admitted into the group of disciples around Crates on condition that she followed the customary practices and rules in every particular.416

These philosophers attached the highest value to virtue; they rejected all other disciplines except morals; nevertheless, they attributed ultimate authority, above any law, to the decisions of their Sage: they decreed no restraints on pleasure [A] except moderation and the respect for the freedom of others.

Heraclitus and Protagoras noted that wine tastes bitter when you are sick, delightful when you are well, and that an oar looks crooked in the water but straight out of it; from these and similar contradictory appearances they argued that every object contains within itself the causes of such appearances: that there was a bitterness in wine which was related to the taste of the sick man; a quality of bentness in the oar which was related to whoever was looking at it in the water; and so on, for all the rest. That is equivalent to saying that everything is in everything; from which it follows that nothing is in anything: for where everything is, nothing is.417

It was this opinion which reminded me of an experience which we have all had, that once you start digging down into a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter, sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there.

Take that clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy which has not discovered ample evidence there for its foundation and continuance? That is why there is one proof which the founders of such erroneous doctrines will never give up: evidence based upon exegesis of words.

A man of some rank, deeply immersed in the quest for the philosopher’s stone, wanted to justify it to me recently on authority: he cited five or six Biblical texts which he said were the ones he chiefly relied on to salve his conscience (for he is in holy orders). The choice of texts he produced was not only amusing but most applicable to the defence of that egregious science.

That is how divinatory nonsense comes to be believed in. Provided that a writer of almanacs has already gained enough authority for people to bother to read his books, examining his words for implications and shades of meaning, he can be made to say anything whatever – like Sybils. There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. [C] That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. (He may achieve that not so much by merit as by some chance interest in his subject-matter.) Then, whether out of subtlety or stupidity, he can contradict himself or express himself obscurely: no matter! Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all of them doing him honour. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the Lendit fair.

[A] This has lent value to many a worthless piece, making several books seem valuable by loading on to them anything at all; one and the same work is susceptible to thousands upon thousands of diverse senses and nuances – as many as we like. [C] Is it possible that Homer really wanted to say all that people have made him say,418 and that he really did provide us with so many and so varied figurative meanings that theologians, military leaders, philosophers and all sorts of learned authors (no matter how different or contradictory their treaties) can refer to him and cite his authority as the Master General of all duties, works and craftsmen, the Counsellor General of all enterprises?

[A] Anyone on the lookout for oracles and predictions has found plenty of material there! I have a learned friend who is astonishingly good at producing wonderfully apt passages from Homer in favour of our religion: he cannot be easily prised from the opinion that Homer actually intended them (yet he knows Homer as well as any man alive). [C] And the very things he finds favouring our religion were thought in ancient times to favour theirs.

See how Plato is tossed and turned about. All are honoured to have his support, so they couch him on their own side. They trot him out and slip him into any new opinion which fashion will accept. When matters take a different turn, then they make him disagree with himself. They force him to condemn forms of behaviour which were quite licit in his own century, just because they are illicit in ours. The more powerful and vigorous the mind of his interpreters, the more vigorously and powerfully they do it.

[A] Democritus took the very foundations of Heraclitus – his assertion that things bear within themselves all the features we find in them – and drew the contrary conclusion, namely, that objects have none of the qualities we find in them: from the fact that honey is sweet to some and bitter to others, he concluded that it was neither sweet nor bitter. The Pyrrhonists said that they did not know whether it is sweet or bitter or neither or both, for they always reach the highest summit of doubt.419 [C] The Cyrenaics held that nothing is perceptible which comes from without: the only things perceptible are those which affect us inwardly, such as pain and pleasure. They did not even recognize the existence of tones or colours, but only certain emotional impulses produced by them; on these alone Man must base his judgement: Protagoras thought that whatever appears true is true for the man concerned; the Epicureans place judgement – in the case of both knowledge and pleasure – in the senses. Plato wanted judgements about Truth, and Truth herself, to be independent of opinion and the senses, belonging only to the mind and thought.420

[A] Such discussion has brought me to the point where I must consider the senses: they are the proof as well as the main foundation of our ignorance.

Without a doubt, anything that is known is known by the faculty of the knower; for, since judgement proceeds from the activity of a judge, it is reasonable that he perform that activity by his own means and by his will, not by outside constraint (as would be the case if the essence of an object were such that it forced us to know it). Now knowledge is conveyed through the senses: they are our Masters:

[B] via qua munita fidei Proxima fert humanum in pectus templaque mentis.

[the highway by which conviction penetrates straight to men’s hearts and to the temple of their minds.]421

[A] Knowledge begins with them and can be reduced to them. After all, we would have no more knowledge than a stone if we did not know that there exist sound, smell, light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, roughness, colour, sheen, breadth, depth. They form the foundations and principles on which our knowledge is built. [C] Indeed, for some thinkers, knowledge is sensation. [A] Anyone who can force me to contradict the evidence of the senses has got me by the throat: he cannot make me retreat any further. The senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge.

Invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam Notitiam veri, neque sensus posse refelli. Quid majore fide porro quam sensus haberi Debet?

[You realize that the conception of truth is produced by the basic senses; the senses cannot be refuted. What should we trust more than our senses, then?]422

Attribute as little to them as you can, but you will have to grant them this: that all the instruction we receive is conveyed by them and through them. Cicero says that when Chrysippus assayed denying their force and power, so many contrary arguments and overwhelming objections occurred to him that he could not answer them. Whereupon Carneades, who maintained the opposite side, boasted of fighting him with his own words and weapons, exclaiming, ‘Wretch! You have been defeated by your own strength!’423

For us there is absolutely nothing more absurd than to say that fire is not hot; that light does not illuminate; that iron has no weight or resistance. Those are notions conveyed to us by our senses. There is no belief or knowledge in man of comparable certainty.

Now, on the subject of the senses, my first point is that I doubt that Man is provided with all the natural senses.424 I note that several creatures live full, complete lives without sight; others, without hearing. Who can tell whether we, also, lack one, two, three or more senses? If we do lack any, our reason cannot even discover that we do so. Our senses are privileged to be the ultimate frontiers of our perception: beyond them there is nothing which could serve to reveal the existence of the senses we lack. One sense cannot reveal another:

[B] An poterunt oculos aures reprehendere, an aures Tactus, an hunc porro tactum sapor arguet oris, An confutabunt nares, oculive revincent?

[Can the ears correct the eyes; the ears the touch? Can the tastes in our mouths correct the touch? Or will our nostrils and our eyes prove touch to be wrong?]

[A] They all form, each one of them, the ultimate boundary of our faculty of knowledge:

seorsum cuique potestas Divisa est, sua vis cuique est.

[For each has received its share and power, quite separate from the others.]425

A man born blind cannot be made to understand what it is not to see; he cannot be made to wish he had sight and to regret what he is lacking. (Therefore we ought not to take comfort from our souls’ being happy and satisfied with the senses we do have; if we are deprived and imperfect, our souls have no way of sensing it.) It is impossible to say anything to that blind man by reason, argument or comparison, which will fix in his understanding what light, colour and sight really are. There is nothing beyond the senses which can supply evidence of them. We do find people who are born blind expressing a wish to see: that does not mean that they know what they are asking for. They have learned from us that they lack something which we have, and they wish that they had it; [C] they name it all right, as well as its effects and its consequences; [A] but they do not know what it is, for all that; they cannot even get near to grasping what it is.

I have met a nobleman of good family who was born blind, or, at least, blind enough not to know what sight is. He has so little knowledge of what he is lacking that he is always using words appropriate to seeing, just as we do; he applies them in his own peculiar way. When he was presented with one of his own godchildren, he took him in his arms and said: ‘My God, what a handsome child. How nice to see him! What a happy face he has.’ He will say (like one of us): ‘What a lovely view there is from this room! What a clear day. How bright the sun is.’ And that is not all. Hearing how much we enjoy the sports of hunting, tennis and shooting, he likes them, too; he tries to join in and believes that he can take part like us. He gets carried away, has a great deal of fun and yet has no knowledge at all of these sports, except through the ears. On open ground, where he can use his spurs, somebody shouts, ‘There goes a hare.’ Then somebody says, ‘Look, the hare has been caught.’ You will see him as proud of the kill as other men he has heard.

At tennis he takes the ball in his left hand and hits it with his racket. As for the harquebus, he shoots at random, and is delighted when his men tell him he has shot too high or too wide.

How do we know that the whole human race is not doing something just as silly? We may all lack some sense or other; because of that defect, most of the features of objects may be concealed from us. How can we know that the difficulties we have in understanding many of the works of Nature do not derive from this, or that several of the actions of animals which exceed our powers of understanding are produced by a sense-faculty which we do not possess? Perhaps some of them, by such means, enjoy a fuller life, a more complete life than we do.

We need virtually all our senses merely to recognize an apple: we recognize redness in it, sheen, smell and sweetness. An apple may well have other qualities than that: for example powers of desiccation or astringency, for which we have no corresponding senses.426

Take what we call the occult properties of many objects (such as the magnet attracting iron).427 Is it not likely that there are certain senses known to Nature which furnish the faculties necessary for perceiving them and understanding them, and that the lack of such faculties entails our ignorance of their true essence? There may be some peculiar sense which tells cocks when it is midday or midnight and makes them crow, [C] or which teaches hens (before any practical experience) to fear the sparrow-hawk but not larger animals like geese or peacocks; which warns chickens of the innate hostility of cats but tells them not to fear dogs; which puts them on their guard against a miaou (quite a pleasing sound, really) but not against a bark (a harsh and aggressive sound);428 which tells hornets, ants and rats how to select the best cheese and the best pear, before they even taste them; [A] which leads stags [C] elephants and snakes [A] to recognize herbs necessary to cure them.

There is no sense which is not dominant and which does not have the means of contributing vast amounts of knowledge. If we had no comprehension of sounds, harmony and the spoken word, that would throw all the rest of our knowledge into inconceivable confusion. For, quite apart from all that arises from the properties of each individual sense, think of the arguments, consequences and conclusions which we infer by comparing one sense with another. Let an intelligent man imagine human nature created, from the beginning, without sight; let him reflect how much ignorance and confusion such a defect would entail, how much darkness and blindness there would be in our minds. We can see from that how vital it would be for our knowledge of truth if we lacked another sense, or two or three senses. We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence.

Those schools which attack Man’s claim to possess knowledge base themselves mainly on the fallibility and weakness of our senses: for, since all knowledge comes to us through them and by them, we have nothing left to hold on to if they fail in their reports to us, if they change and corrupt what they convey to us from outside, or if the light which filters through to our mind from them is darkened in the process.

This ultimate difficulty has given rise to many strange notions: that a given object does have all the qualities we find in it; that it has none of the qualities which we think we find in it;429 or, as the Epicureans contend, that the Sun is no bigger than our sight judges it to be –

[B] Quicquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura Quam nostris oculis quam cernimus, esse videtur

[Be that as it may, its size is no bigger than it seems when we behold it]430

[A] – or, that those appearances which make an object look big when you are close to it and smaller when you are farther from it, are both true –

[B] Nec tamen hic oculis falli concedimus hilum Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli

[We do not at all concede that the eyes can be deceived. Do not attribute to the eyes the errors of the mind]431

[A] – or, conclusively, that there is no deception whatsoever in our senses, so that we must throw ourselves on their mercy and seek elsewhere the justification for any differences and contradictions which we find in them: that, indeed, we should invent some lie or raving lunacy (yes, they get as far as that!) rather than condemn our senses.

[C] Timagoras said that he did not really see the candle-flame double when he squeezed his eye-ball sideways, but that this appearance arose from a defect of opinion not of vision.432 [A] The absurdest of all absurdities [C] for Epicureans [A] is to deny [C] the effective power of [A] the senses:

Proinde quod in quoque est his visum tempore, verum est.Et, si non potuit ratio dissolvere causam,Cur ea quae fuerint juxtim quadrata, procul sintVisa rotunda, tamen praestat rationis egentemReddere mendose causas utriusque figurae,Quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam,Et violare fidem primam, et convellere totaFundamenta quibus nixatur vita salusque.Non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsaConcidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis,Praecipitesque locos vitare, et caetera quae sintIn genere hoc fugienda.

[Consequently, whatever, at any time, has seemed to the senses to be true, is in fact true. If reason cannot unravel the causes which explain why things that are square when you are close to them appear round at a distance, it is better to find some untrue explanation of these two different impressions than to let the evidence of our senses slip through our fingers, violate first principles and shake the foundations on which our lives and their preservation are built. For, if we could no longer trust our senses and so avoid the giddy heights and other dangers Man must shun, not only would our Reason collapse in ruins but our lives as well.]433

[C] That is a counsel of despair. It is quite unphilosophical. It reveals that human knowledge can only be supported by an unreasonable Reason, by mad lunatic ravings; that, if Man is to make himself worth anything, it is better to exploit ‘Reason’ such as this or any other remedy, no matter how fantastic it may be, rather than to admit so unflattering a truth that he is, of necessity, as stupid as a beast. Man cannot avoid the fact that his senses are both the sovereign regents of his knowledge, and yet, in all circumstances, uncertain and fallible. So here they must fight to a finish; if legitimate weapons fail us – and they do – they must use stubbornness, foolhardiness or cheek!

[B] Should what the Epicureans say be true (namely, that if the senses play us false we have no knowledge at all);434 and should what the Stoics say be equally true (that sensible appearances are so deceptive that they can give rise in us to no knowledge whatever); then we are forced to conclude, at the expense of the two great schools of Dogmatists, that there is no such thing as knowledge.

[A] Anybody can provide as many examples as he pleases of the ways our senses deceive or cheat us, since so many of their faults or deceptions are quite banal: a trumpet sounds a league behind us, but an echo in a valley may make it seem to come from in front:

[B] Extantesque procul medio de gurgite montes Iidem apparent longe diversi licet Et fugere ad puppim colles campique videntur Quos agimus propter navim ubi in medio nobis equus acer obhaesit Flumine, equi corpus transversum ferre videtur Vis, et in adversum flumen contrudere raptim.

[Distant mountains beetling over the sea may appear as one, yet are in fact many; as we sail along, hills and plains appear to be rushing towards our prow; if we look down when our horse stops in mid-stream, the river seems to be forcing it to go upstream against the current.]435

[A] Hold a musket-ball beneath your second finger, with your middle finger entwined over it: you will have to force yourself to admit that there is only one ball, so decidedly do you sense it to be two. We can see every day that our senses have mastery over our reason, forcing it to receive impressions which it knows to be false and judges to be false.

I will not go into the sense of touch. Its effects are immediate, lively and concrete; many a time, as a result of the pain which it causes the body, it overthrows all those fine Stoic axioms. It takes a man who has resolutely made up his mind that colic paroxysms are a thing indifferent (like any other pain or disease) and that they have no power to affect the blessed state of supreme felicity in which the Sage has been lodged by his Stoic Virtue – and makes him yell about his belly.

No heart is so flabby that the sounds of our drums and trumpets do not set it ablaze, nor so hard that sweet music does not tickle it and enliven it; no soul is so sour that it does not feel touched by some feeling of reverence436 when it contemplates the sombre vastness of our Churches, the great variety of their decorations and our ordered liturgy, or when it hears the enchantment of the organ and the poised religious harmony of men’s voices. Even those who come to scoff are brought to distrust their opinion by a shiver in their heart and a sense of dread.

[B] As for me, I do not think I would be strong enough to remain unmoved even by verses of Horace or Catullus, if well sung by a good voice coming from a fair young mouth! [C] Zeno was right to claim that the voice is Beauty’s flower.437 Some people have even tried to make me believe that a famous man known to all Frenchmen had impressed me unduly with a recital of some of his verses, which seem very different seen on paper than heard in the air, and that my eyes would contradict my ears, so great is the power of eloquent delivery to endow any work which accepts its sway with value and style.

While on the topic, Philoxenus’ reaction was not without charm: he heard a piece he had composed being sung badly, so he jumped on some of the singer’s tiles and smashed them. ‘I spoil your things,’ (he said) ‘you despoil mine!’438

[A] Why did even those who had firmly decided to die avert their gaze from the very blow which they ordered to be struck? Why do those who have freely agreed to cauterizations and incisions for the sake of their health find that they cannot stand the sight of all the preparations, of the surgical instruments or of the actual operation? Sight does not share in the pain.

Are not these appropriate examples for demonstrating the authority of our senses over our powers of reason? – Even though we know that a lady’s tresses are borrowed from a page or a lackey; that her rosy colour comes from Spain and her smooth whiteness from the ocean, we still find her person more attractive and agreeable – quite unreasonably, though, for in all that nothing is her own:

Auferimur cultu; gemmis auroque teguntur Crimina: pars minima est ipsa puella sui. Saepe ubi sit quod ames inter tam multa requiras: Decipit hac oculos Aegide, dives amor.

[We are carried away by clothing; ugliness is hidden behind gems and gold; the smallest part of herself is the actual girl! You can often look in vain for the girl you love under all these gewgaws. This is the shield with which the rich deceive a lover’s eyes.]439

What great power our poets attribute to the senses, when they make Narcissus enamoured of his own reflection:

Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse; Se cupit imprudens; et qui probat, ipse probatur; Dumque petit, petitur; pariterque accendit et ardet.

[He is enchanted by his own enchantments; unawares, he loves himself; he both praises and is praised; he yearns and is yearned for; the passion he kindles enflames himself]

Similarly, Pygmalion’s mind was disturbed by the visual impact of his ivory statue: he fell in love with it and sighed for it:

Oscula dat reddique putat, sequiturque tenetque, Et credit tactis digitos insidere membris; Et metuit pressos veniat ne livor in artus.

[He kisses her, and believes his kisses are returned; he waits on her, embraces her; he believes her limbs respond to the touch of his fingers; he fears that in his ardour he may bruise her.]440

Take a philosopher, put him in a cage made from thin wires set wide apart; hang him from one of the towers of Notre Dame de Paris. It is evident to his reason that he cannot fall; yet (unless he were trained as a steeplejack) when he looks down from that height he is bound to be terrified and beside himself. It is hard enough to feel safe at the top of a church tower, even behind open-work ramparts of stone: some people cannot even bear thinking about it.

Take a beam wide enough to walk along: suspend it between two towers: there is no philosophical wisdom, however firm, which could make us walk along it just as we would if we were on the ground.

I am not particularly afraid of heights, but when I was on the French side of the Italian Alps I made an assay and found that I could not suffer the sight of those boundless depths without a shiver of horror; I was at least my own height away from the edge and could not have fallen over unless I deliberately exposed myself to danger: yet my knees and thighs were trembling. I also noticed that, whatever the height, it was comforting and reassuring if there happened to be some tree or rock jutting out on the slope which could hold our gaze and interrupt our vision: it was as though they could have helped us if we fell. But when the precipices were sheer and smooth we could not even look at them without feeling giddy, [C] ‘ut despici sine vertigine simul oculorum animique non possit’ [such that no one could look down without vertigo in eyes and mind].441

Which shows how sight can deceive us.

One fine philosopher even poked out his eyes so as to free his mind from visual debauchery; he could then go on philosophizing in freedom. But by the same standard he ought to have blocked up his ears442 – [B] which Theophrastus says are the most dangerous of all our organs when it comes to receiving violent impressions capable of changing and disturbing us.443 [A] Eventually he would have to deprive himself of every other sense (tantamount to life and being), for all the senses can have this dominant power over our reason and our soul: [C] ‘Fit etiam saepe specie quadam, saepe vocum gravitate et cantibus, ut pellantur animi vehementius; saepe etiam cura et timore’ [Some visual feature, some grave voice or incantations may often strike the mind most vehemently: worry and care may often do that too].444

[A] Doctors maintain that people with some complexions can be driven mad by certain sounds or instruments. I have known people who could not even hear a bone being gnawed under their table without losing control; and there is hardly a person who is not upset by the sharp rasping sound of a file against iron. Some people are moved to anger or even hatred by hearing somebody chewing nearby or talking with some obstruction of their throat or nose.

Gracchus had a prompter who was a flautist; he conducted the voice of his master, softening it or making it firm:445 what use was he if the rhythm and quality of the sounds did not have the power of moving and swaying the judgement of the listeners? We have good enough reason to make a fuss about this judgement of ours: it lets itself be affected and managed by the modulations and properties of so light a breath of wind!

The senses deceive our intellect; it deceives them in their turn. Our soul sometimes gets her own back: [C] they both vie with each other in lying and deceiving. [A] When we are moved to anger, we do not hear things as they are:

Et solem geminum, et duplices se ostendere Thebas. [We see twin suns: two Thebes.]446

Love someone and she appears more beautiful than she is:

[B] Multimodis igitur pravas turpesque videmus Esse in delitiis, summoque in honore vigere.

[Many ugly and deformed women are deeply loved, enjoying, as we see, the highest favour.]447

[A] And anyone we dislike appears more ugly. When a man is in pain and affliction, the very light of day seems sombre and dark. Our senses are not only changed for the worse, they are knocked quite stupid by the passions of the soul. How many things do we see which we do not even notice when our minds are preoccupied with other matters?

In rebus quoque apertis noscere possis, Si non advertas animum, proinde esse, quasi omni Tenmpore semotaefuerint, longeque remotae.

[Even in the case of things which are clearly visible, you know that if you do not turn your mind to them, it is as though they had never been there or were far away.]448

It seems, then, that the soul draws the powers of the senses right into herself and makes them waste their time.

And so, both within and without, man is full of weakness and of lies.

[B] Those who have compared our lives to a dream are right – perhaps more right than they realized. When we are dreaming our soul lives, acts and exercises all her faculties neither more nor less than when she is awake, but she does it much more slackly and darkly; the difference is definitely not so great as between night and the living day: more like that between night and twilight. In one case the soul is sleeping, in the other more or less slumbering; but there is always darkness, perpetual Cimmerian darkness.

[C] We wake asleep: we sleep awake. When I am asleep I do see things less clearly but I never find my waking pure enough or cloudless. Deep sleep can sometimes even put dreams to sleep; but our waking is never so wide awake that it can cure and purge those raving lunacies, those waking dreams that are worse than the real ones.

Our rational souls accept notions and opinions produced during sleep, conferring on activities in our dreams the same approbation and authority as on our waking dreams: why should we therefore not doubt whether our thinking and acting are but another dream; our waking, some other species of sleep?

[A] If the senses are our basic judges, we should not merely call upon our own for counsel: where this faculty is concerned, the animals have as much right as we do, or even more. Some certainly have better hearing, sight, smell, touch or taste. Democritus said that the gods and the beasts have faculties of sense far more perfect than Man does.

Now there are extreme differences between the action of their senses and ours: our saliva cleanses and dries up our wounds: it kills snakes.449

Tantaque in his rebus distantia differitasque est, Ut quod aliis cibus est, aliis fuat acre venenum. Saepe etenim serpens, hominis contacta saliva, Disperit, ac sese mandendo confict ipsa.

[There are so many differences and variations: one man’s food is another man’s bitter poison. Indeed if a snake comes into contact with human saliva, it begins to bite its own tail and dies.]450

So what quality are we to give to saliva? Do we follow our own senses or the snake’s? We are trying to discover the truth about its true essence: which of the two will tell us? Pliny says that there are certain ‘sea-hares’ in the Indies which are poison to us and we to them: a touch kills them.451 Which is truly poisonous, the fish or the man? Which should we believe: the effect of the fish on the man or the man on the fish? [B] The quality of one kind of air is infectious to Man but not to cattle; another has the quality of being infectious to cattle but harmless to men. Which of the two has truly and naturally the quality of being infectious? [A] Sufferers from jaundice see everything paler and yellower than we do:

[B] Lurida praeterea fiunt quaecunque tuentur Arquati.

[Those ill from ‘rainbow-yellow’ see everything in sallow colours.]452

[A] There is a suffusion of blood under the skin around the eye which doctors call Hyposphragma – those who suffer from it see everything blood-red.453 How do we know that these humours, which can affect the workings of Man’s eyesight, are not the dominant norm among beasts? Some animals, as we know, have yellow eyes exactly like sufferers from jaundice and others have eyes which are blood-red. It is probable that the colours of objects appear different to them and to us. Who judges them right? Nobody claims that the essence of anything relates only to its effect on Man. Hardness, whiteness, depth, bitterness – such qualities are of service to animals and are known to them as to ourselves: Nature has granted that they be useful to animals as well as to us men.

If we squeeze one of our eyes, the objects we look at appear thinner and elongated: many beasts have eyes which are always squeezed up like that. For all we know, that elongated form is the true one, not what our eyes see in their normal state. [B] If we press up our eyes from the bottom, we see double:

Bina lucernarum florentia lumina flammis, Et duplices hominum facies, et corpora bina.

[The lamp has twin flowerings of light, men have twin faces and twin bodies.]454

[A] If our ears are blocked up or if the auricular passage is constricted we hear sounds differently from normal: animals have hairy ears or, in some cases, merely a little hole instead of an ear: consequently, they do not hear what we hear and the sound is perceived differently.455

At banquets or in the theatre, when various shades of coloured glass are placed in front of the torches, we know that they can make everything appear green, yellow or violet:

[B] Et vulgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela Et ferruginea, cum magnis intenta theatris Per malos volgata trabesque trementia pendent: Namque ibi consessum caveai subter, et omnem Scenai speciem, patrum, matrumque, deorumque Inficiunt, coguntque suo volitare colore.

[When yellow, red or rust-brown awnings are stretched over our vast theatres, flapping about in the wind on their poles and their frames, it is quite usual for them to impart their colours to the stage and to the whole assembly seated in their seats, to senators and matrons and to the statues of the gods, as their colours dance about.]456

[A] It seems likely that the different coloured eyes which we can notice in some animals may impart corresponding colours to what the animals see.

If we want to judge the activities of the senses we should agree with the animals and then among ourselves. We are far from doing that. Quarrels are constantly arising because one person hears, sees or tastes something differently from another. As much as anything, we quarrel over, the diversity of the images conveyed to us by our senses.457

A child, a man of thirty, a sexagenarian, each hears and sees things differently: that is a normal law of Nature. Similarly for taste. Some people’s senses are dullish and dimmer: others are more open and acute. We perceive objects to be like this or that in accordance with our own state and how they seem to us.458 But seeming, for human beings, is so uncertain and so controvertible that it is no miracle if we are told that we may acknowledge that snow seems white to us but cannot guarantee to establish that it is truly so in essence. And once you shake that first principle, all the knowledge in the world is inevitably swept away.

What about our very senses hampering each other? A painting may seem to have depth, but feels flat. Musk is pleasant to the smell but offensive to the taste: should we call it pleasant or not? There are herbs and ointments suitable to one part of the body but injurious to another; honey is pleasant to taste, unpleasant to look at.459 Take those rings wrought in the shape of plumes which are called in heraldry Feathers without Ends. Can any eye ever be sure how wide they are and avoid being taken in by the optical illusion? For they seem to get wider on one side, narrower and more pointed on the other, especially if you turn them round your finger; yet to your touch they all appear to have the same width all the way round.

– [C] (In the ancient world some men increased their lust by the use of distorting mirrors which enlarged whatever was put before them, so that the organs used on the job pleased them more, because they looked as though they had grown bigger. But which sense did they allow to win? Was it their sight, which showed them their members as thick and big as they liked, or was it their touch, which showed the same members to be tiny and despicable?) –460

[A] Is it our senses which endow the object with these diverse attributes, whereas, in reality, objects only have one? Rather like bread when we eat it; it is one thing, bread, but we turn it into several: bones, blood, flesh, hair and nails.

[B] Ut cibus, in membra atque artus cum diditur omnes, Disperit, atque aliam naturam sufficit ex se.

[Like food, which spreads to all our limbs and joints, destroys itself and produces another substance.]461

[A] Moisture is sucked up by the roots of a tree: it becomes trunk, leaf and fruit; air is one, but when applied to a trumpet it is diversified into a thousand kinds of sound: is it our senses (I say) which similarly fashion such objects with diverse qualities or do they really have such qualities? Then, given that doubt, what conclusion can we reach about their true essence?

And then, to go further still: the attributes of illness, madness or sleep make things appear different from what they do to the healthy, the sane and the waking man:462 is it not likely therefore that our rightful state and our natural humours also have attributes which can endow an object with a mode of being corresponding to their own characteristics, making it conform to themselves, just as our disordered humours do? [C] Why should a temperate complexion not endow objects with a form corresponding to itself just as our distempers can, stamping its own imprint upon them?463 On to his wine the queasy man loads tastelessness; the healthy man, a bouquet; the thirsty man, sheer delight.

[A] Now, since our state makes things correspond to itself and transforms them in conformity with itself, we can no longer claim to know what anything truly is: nothing reaches us except as altered and falsified by our senses. When the compasses, the set-square and the ruler are askew, all the calculations made with them and all the structures raised according to their measurements, are necessarily out of true and ready to collapse.

The unreliability of our senses renders unreliable everything which they put forward:

Denique ut in fabrica, si prava est regula prima, Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit, Et libella aliqua si exparte claudicat hilum, Omnia mendose fieri atque obstipa necessum est, Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona tecta, Jam ruere ut quaedam videantur velle, ruantque Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis. Hic igitur ratio tibi rerum prava necesse est Falsaque sit, falsis quaecumque a sensibus orta est.

[It is as when a building is erected: if the ruler is false from the outset, or the set-square deceptive and out of true, if the level limps a bit to one side, then the building is necessarily wrong and crooked; it is deformed, pot-bellied, toppling forwards or backwards and quite disjointed; some parts seem about to fall down now: all will fall down soon, betrayed by the original mistakes of calculation; similarly every argument that you base on facts will prove wrong and false, if the facts themselves are based on senses which prove false.]464

And meanwhile who will be a proper judge of such differences? It is like saying that we could do with a judge who is not bound to either party in our religious strife, who is dispassionate and without prejudice. Among Christians that cannot be.465 The same applies here: if the judge is old, he cannot judge the sense-impressions of old age, since he is a party to the dispute; so too if he is young; so too if he is well; so too if he is unwell, asleep or awake.466 We would need a man exempt from all these qualities, so that, without preconception, he could judge those propositions as matters indifferent to him.

On this reckoning we would need such a judge as never was.

We register the appearance of objects; to judge them we need an instrument of judgement; to test the veracity of that instrument we need practical proof; to test that proof we need an instrument. We are going round in circles.467

The senses themselves being full of uncertainty cannot decide the issue of our dispute. It will have to be Reason, then. But no Reason can be established except by another Reason. We retreat into infinity.468 Our mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it; therefore the thought and the appearance are not properties of the object but only the impressions and feelings of the senses. Those impressions and that object are different things. So whoever judges from appearances judges from something quite different from the object itself.

If you say that these sense-impressions convey the quality of outside objects to our souls by means of resemblances, how can our rational soul make sure that they are resemblances, since it has no direct contact of its own with the outside objects? It is like a man who does not know Socrates; if he sees a portrait of him he cannot say whether it resembles him or not.469

But supposing, nevertheless, that anyone did wish to judge from appearances, he cannot do so from all of them, since (as we know from experience) they all mutually impede each other because of contradictions and discrepancies. Will he select only some appearances to control the others? But the first one selected will have to be tested for truth against another one selected, and that one against a third: the end will therefore never be reached.470

To conclude: there is no permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of judgement and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and changing.471

‘We have no communication with Being;472 as human nature is wholly ‘situated, for ever, between birth and death, it shows itself only as a dark ‘shadowy appearance, an unstable weak opinion. And if you should ‘determine to try and grasp what Man’s being is, it would be exactly like ‘trying to hold a fistful of water: the more tightly you squeeze anything the ‘nature of which is always to flow, the more you will lose what you try to ‘retain in your grasp. So, because all things are subject to pass from change ‘to change, Reason is baffled if it looks for a substantial existence in them, ‘since it cannot apprehend a single thing which subsists permanently, ‘because everything is either coming into existence (and so not fully ‘existing yet) or beginning to die before it is born.’ Plato said that bodies never have existence, though they certainly have birth, [C] believing that Homer made Oceanus Father of the Gods and Thetis their Mother, to show that all things are in a state of never-ending inconstancy, change and flux (an opinion, as he says, common to all the philosophers before his time, with the sole exception of Parmenides, who denied that anything has motion – attaching great importance to the force of that idea).473

[A] Pythagoras taught that all matter is labile and flowing;474 the Stoics, that there is no such thing as the present (which is but the joining and the coupling together of the future and past);475 ‘Heraclitus, that no man ever stepped twice into the same river’ –([B] Epicharmus, that a man who borrowed money in the past does not owe it now, and that a man invited to breakfast yesterday evening turns up this morning uninvited, both having become different people).476 – [A] Heraclitus ‘that no ‘mortal substance can ever be found twice in an identical state because the ‘rapidity and ease of its changes make it constantly disperse and reassemble; ‘it is coming and going, so that whatever begins to be born never achieves ‘perfect existence, since its delivery is never complete and never stops as ‘though it had come to the end; but, ever since the seeds of it were sown, it ‘is continually modifying and changing from one thing to another; just as ‘from the human seed there first springs a shapeless embryo in the mother’s ‘womb, then a human shape, then, once out of the womb, a suckling child, ‘then a boy, then, in due course, a youth, a mature man, an elderly and ‘then a decrepit, aged man, so that each subsequent age to which birth is ‘given is for ever undoing and destroying the previous one.’

[B] Mutat enim mundi naturam totius aetas, Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet, Nec manet ulla sui similis res: omnia migrant, Omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit.

[For Time changes the nature of all things in the world; each stage must be succeeded by another, nothing remains as it was; all things depart and Nature modifies all things and compels them to change.]477

[A] ‘And after that we men stupidly fear one species of death, when we ‘have already passed through so many other deaths and do so still; yet, as ‘Heraclitus said, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death ‘of air the birth of water, but we may see it even more clearly in ourselves: ‘the flower of our life withers and dies into old age; but youth ended in that ‘adult flower, as childhood in youth and as that embryonic stage died into ‘childhood; yesterday dies into today, and this day will die into tomorrow. ‘Nothing lasts; nothing remains forever one.’478

To prove that this is so: ‘if we remained forever one and the same, how ‘is it that we can delight in one thing now and later in another? How can ‘we each be one if we love or hate contradictory things, first praising them, ‘then condemning them?479 How can we have different emotions, no ‘longer retaining the same sentiment within the same thought? For it is not ‘likely that we can experience different reactions unless we ourselves have ‘changed; but whoever suffers change is no longer the same one: he no ‘longer is. For his being, as such, changes when his being one changes, as each ‘personality ever succeeds another. And, consequently, it is of the nature of ‘our senses to be misled and deceived. Because they do not know what being ‘is, they take appears to be for is.

‘What is it then which truly IS? That which is eternal – meaning that ‘which has never been born; which will never have an end; to which Time ‘can never bring any change. For Time is a thing of movement, appearing ‘like a shadow in the eternal flow and flux of matter, never remaining stable ‘or’ permanent;480 to Time belong the words before and after; has been and ‘shall be, words that show at a glance that Time is evidently not a thing ‘which IS. For it would be great silliness and manifest falsehood to say that ‘something IS which has not yet come into being or has already ceased to ‘be.

‘With the words “Present”, “This instant”, “Now”, we above all appear ‘to support and stabilize our understanding of Time: but Reason strips it ‘bare and at once destroys it: for Reason straightway cleaves Now into two ‘distinct parts, the future and the past, as needing of necessity to see it thus ‘divided into two parts.

‘The same applies to Nature (which is measured) as to Time (which ‘measures her): for there is nothing in Nature, either, which lasts or subsists; ‘in her, all things are either born, being born, or dying.481

‘It would therefore be a sin to say He was or He will be of God, who is ‘the only ONE who IS. For those terms are transitions, declensions and ‘vicissitudes in things which cannot endure nor remain in Being.

‘From which we must conclude that God alone is: not according to any ‘measure known to Time, but according to an unchanging and immortal ‘eternity, not measured by Time, not subject to any declension; before ‘Whom nothing is, neither will there be anything after Him, nor anything ‘newer or more recent; but ONE, existing in reality, He fills Eternity with a ‘single Now; nothing really IS but He alone; of Him you cannot say He ‘was or He will be: He has no beginning and no end.’482

To that very religious conclusion of a pagan I would merely add one more word from a witness of the same condition, in order to bring to a close this long and tedious discourse which could furnish me with matter for ever. ‘Oh, what a vile and abject thing is Man,’ he said, ‘if he does not rise above humanity.’483

[C] A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For [A] to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can see only with his own eyes, grip only with his own grasp. He will rise if God proffers him – [C] extraordinarily –[A] His hand; he will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.484

[C] It is for our Christian faith, not that Stoic virtue of his, to aspire to that holy and miraculous metamorphosis.485